Contact improvization teacher, Bill Young, will be teaching our BFA 1 and BFA 2 classes for the Spring Semester!
Bill Young / Courtesy of Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Co.
Bill Young (winner of Guggenheim and NY Foundation for Arts Awards) discovered dance through contact improvisation while studying music at Oberlin College. He showed early work in San Francisco while dancing with Margaret Jenkins, and later moved to New York City where he danced with Douglas Dunn, Randy Warshaw, and Merce Cunningham (on video).
In 1988 he established Bill Young and Dancers, which has been presented in New York City at the Joyce Theater, DTW, The Kitchen, Danspace Project, PS 122, Movement Research, Symphony Space and the 92nd St. Y (among others), and on repeated international tours, including performances in Austria, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Canada, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Finland, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Venezuela.
Now an international group of artists (with recent and current dancers hailing from the US, Greece, Germany, Africa, China, Albania and Venezuela), the company has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, NYSCA, the NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the Mary Duke Biddle, Joyce Mertz-Gilmore, Harkness and Greenwall Foundations, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Artslink, the Suitcase Fund, the State Dept., the Fund for US Artists at International Festivals, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
Bill has created over 70 works; his commissions include new works for the Estonian National Opera Ballet, the Zenon Dance Company, Bratislava Dance Theater, the Madach Theater (Budapest), DanceArt Hong Kong, the Core Performance Group (Atlanta), the Wildspace Dance Company (Milwaukee), Compagnie de Danse L'Astragale (Montréal), Teória de Gravedad (Mexico), and Pennsylvania Dance Theater. He has taught in Universities and Festivals in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia, and has served as a panelist for Artslink, DTW, ACDFA and NYFA.
Bio courtesy of Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Co.
NYU Tisch dancers take class with Bill Young
