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Dancers Collaborators
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Sarah Council Dance Projects is a project-based dance company founded in 2007 by choreographer Sarah Council as a platform to create emotionally and physically honest dance performance works. These dances explore and reflect life's poignant moments -– from the beautiful to the tragic, the curious to the absurd. Drawn from a collection of personal experiences, research and observations, Council's choreography flows between clarity and abandon. Aesthetically interested in the specific, her work uses articulate movement and authentic expression to construct images that provoke thought, conjure memory and capture imaginations.
My process unfolds in three phases: collection, expansion, and distillation.
I am a collector. I collect things that I see, hear and read. I collect words, phrases, ideas and objects. I treasure color and line. I observe the uniqueness of people and the interactions between them. These collections are filed away in my imagination, only to reemerge as seeds of a concept or threads of an idea. When these entry points present themselves, I begin mapping images, gestures, and phrases, allowing a movement vocabulary to emerge.
As I move into the expansion phase of the creative process, I enter into explorations that move past my first thoughts and most obvious solutions. Searching for what is just behind my initial instincts; these explorations unfold over time and allow for the building of layers and depth.
Distillation is the final step of the process. Aesthetically I am drawn to the specific: clarity of line and articulation of gesture and expression. Ultimately, I want to reduce the work to only what it calls for, to the essence of simple truth expressed through dance.
Sarah Council is a choreographer and teacher based in New York City. She founded Sarah Council Dance Projects, a project-based dance company, in 2007 as a platform to explore her choreographic ideas. Her choreography has been showcased in NYC at the Riverside Theatre, The 92nd St. Y, The Flea Theater, The Secret Theater, The LABA Theater, Merce Cunningham Studio, Solar One, Dance Theater Workshop , Triskelion Arts, Topaz Arts, Times Square Arts Center, Green Space, Dance New Amsterdam, and Gowanus Arts. She also works in the New York City Public Schools as a teaching artist for Together in Dance, teaching creative movement and modern dance to children of all ages.
Before relocating to New York City, Sarah resided in Washington DC where her choreography was presented at the Jack Guidone Theater and Dance Place and funded by a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. The Washington Post described her choreography as being "...uncommonly honest and expressive". While in DC she was also able to dance with DC choreographers/companies Citydance Ensemble, Deborah Riley Dance Projects, Sharon Mansur/Impact, Gesel Mason, Cynthia Word, and Helanius Wilkens, as well as teach in many studios and public schools throughout the region.
Sarah holds a BFA in modern dance performance from the University of Oklahoma. While at OU she received several awards for excellence in performance and choreography and worked with teachers and choreographers, Denise Vale, Ko Yukihiro, Derrick Minter, and Earl Mosley performing nationally and internationally.
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