Biography
| Nancy Stark Smith first trained as an athlete
and gymnast, leading her to study and perform modern and postmodern
dance in the early 1970s, greatly influenced by the dance/theater
improvisation group the Grand Union and the Judson Dance Theater
breakthroughs of the 1960s in NYC. She graduated from Oberlin College
with a degree in dance and writing. In 1972, she danced in the first
performances of Contact Improvisation in NYC and has since been
central to its development as a dancer, teacher, performer, organizer,
and writer/publisher, working extensively over the years with Steve
Paxton and others. |
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In 1975, she cofounded Contact Quarterly, a vehicle for moving ideas, an international dance and improvisation journal, which she continues to coedit and produce with Lisa Nelson, as well as codirecting Contact Editions which produces and distributes nonperiodical new dance literature. Her own writing appears in the recently released book, Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader published by Wesleyan University Press. Throughout all her activities, she continues to explore the bodymind states that are generated while dancing, the life cycle of form as it manifests in improvisation, and how any of this research can be communicated in performance and in print. She lives in western Massachusetts, in the northeast of the U.S.A. |
