University Calendar

Following the 8 p.m. performance of doug elkins choreography, etc, stay for a free Community Conversation with choreographer Doug Elkins, moderated by dancer-choreographer-writer, Wendy Perron. Watch Wendy and Doug's discussion for Choreography in Focus.

Doug Elkins is a two-time New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award–winning choreographer and 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Creative Arts Fellow. He began his dance career as a B-Boy, touring the world with break-dance groups New York Dance Express and Magnificent Force, among others. Elkins is a recipient of significant choreographic commissions and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Yard on Martha’s Vineyard (Paul Taylor Fellowship, 1991, and Resident Artist, 2011–2013), Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Joyce Theater Foundation, Arnhold Foundation, Dianne & Daniel Vapnek Family Fund, National Performance Network, Jerome Foundation, Choo-San Goh & H. Robert Magee Foundation, and The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. He has received a Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal, sharing the stage with author Philip Roth and photographer Nan Goldin (1994); the Martha Hill Award for Career Achievement (New York City, 2006); and an Elliot Norton Award for Choreography (Boston, 2010). A graduate of SUNY/Purchase, Elkins received his MFA in Dance from Hollins University/American Dance Festival in 2007. His tenure at the Beacon School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is the subject of Where the Dance Is, a short film by Marta Renzi. In fall 2013, he became a full-time faculty member at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. For the spring 2016 season at the Koch Theater, he was commissioned to create The Weight of Smoke for Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, a dance reprised for the Taylor Company’s 2017 New York season.

Wendy Perron had a 30-year career as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and writer. She was a member of the Trisha Brown Company in the 1970s, and made more than 40 works for her own group in the 1980s and 90s. She has taught dance technique, choreography, and criticism at many colleges including Bennington and Princeton and currently teaches a graduate seminar at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In the early 1990s she served as associate director of Jacob’s Pillow. Wendy has written for many publications including The New York Times, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair online, and Dance Magazine, where she was editor in chief from 2004 to 2013. Her book of selected writings, Through the Eyes of a Dancer, was published in 2013. She is profiled in the documentary film Retracing Steps: American Dance Since Postmodernism (1988), and was inducted into New York Foundation for the Arts’ Hall of Fame in 2011. Wendy is currently editor at large at Dance Magazine and also posts commentary at wendyperron.com. The exhibit she co-curated at UC Santa Barbara, “Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972,” comes to the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center May 24 to September 16.

Learn more about Wendy here.

No ticket required for the Community Conversation.

Don’t miss the performances of doug elkins choreography, etc., April 20 - 23!

 Visit peakperfs.org for more information.

 No charge for undergraduate students (with valid MSU ID) — pick up your ticket at the Kasser Theater box office.

 All others just $20!