From DU website:
‘I’m extremely honored to receive this commission, as it’s an amazing opportunity to build bridges between my work and a new part of the world. I make dances in order to figure out what exists on the other side of what we comfortably know and to push us to understand our own biases and expectations at a deeper level. I am thrilled to have the support of Dance Umbrella with a nomination from Stephen Petronio to continue doing this hyper-physical, investigative, cross-cultural research that challenges assumptions that often contain us to our own separate bubbles, within the dance field and beyond.’
Abby Zbikowski created her company Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 to experiment with the potential and choreographic possibility of the body being pushed beyond its perceived limits, creating a new movement lexicon that works towards triangulating dancing/moving bodies across multiple cultural value systems simultaneously. She received the 2017 Juried Bessie Award for the use of her “unique and utterly authentic movement vocabulary in complex and demanding structures to create works of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger.” She is an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-In-Residence at the Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University (2017-2019) and has been in residence at Bates Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, and the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics. Zbikowski has studied intensively at Germaine Acogny’s L’École de Sables in Senegal, and holds a BFA in dance from Temple University and an MFA in dance from The Ohio State University.
photo: Effy Falck