Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods: Violet

Last seen at NYU Skirball with Until Our Hearts Stop (2018), Meg Stuart|Damaged Goods returns with VIOLET (2011), perhaps her most abstract work so far, turning to movement as its primary motor. The five dancers reveal simultaneously and singularly a landscape of energetic patterns and kinetic sculptures, a charged terrain of options. Musician Brendan Dougherty’s electronic music and drums, performed live, accompanies the dancers.

Recipient of the Venice Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance and 2008 Bessie Award (and Tisch alum), Meg Stuart, born in New Orleans, is a choreographer, director and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. With her company Damaged Goods, founded in 1994, she has created over thirty productions, moving freely between the genres of dance, theater, and visual arts. Her work is driven by a sense of experiment and artistic cross-pollination, challenging the limits of the body and expanding our perception of reality. She uses fiction and shifting narrative layers to expose the scripts that are written not only on our bodies but also on the spaces and landscapes that we move in. Stuart’s work questions how we can rewrite these histories of ourselves and others not by looking back, but by harnessing the potential of the moment. Through her practice, she explores dance as a way to transform the social fabric and gather communities.

Meg Stuart is the recent recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Award in Dance from the Venice Biennale. Stuart is a New Orleans-born choreographer and dancer living and working in Berlin and Brussels. Stuart moved to New York in 1983 and was actively involved in the downtown New York dance scene. Together with her company, Damaged Goods, she has created over 30 stage works, ranging from solos to large-scale choreographies, sitespecific creations and improvisation projects. Stuart strives to develop a new language for every piece in collaboration with artists from different creative disciplines and navigates the tension between dance and theater. Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods has an on-going collaboration with Kaaitheater (Brussels) and HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin).