Introducing Sarah Lass
I am a dancer, choreographer, writer, and educator, currently splitting my time between Louisiana and Massachusetts. My work centers dance improvisation and compositional practice in conversation with a wide range of fields including ecology, neurophysiology, and philosophy to explore intersections between embodiment, perception, and design. The mode of my creative output encompasses choreography, performance, creative writing, and academic scholarship.
My choreography, presented in proscenium theatres, intimate studio settings, galleries, bars, and libraries, often sets into motion formal systems or processes, or explicitly introduces spatial, temporal, or gestural constraints, and then creates frames to witness how such systems and processes, and our understanding of them, transforms over time—deepening, decaying, or changing entirely. I am interested in the way in which constraint, turbulence, friction, and risk can launch bodies into spaces of emergent, not-yet-landed relations, which, for me, are spaces where revolution and remaking are possible. My choreography has been presented by the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, Marlboro College, Keene State College, Smith College, Triskelion Arts, 10forward, Movement Research, UL Lafayette and others. My recent creative collaborators include Bebe Miller, Angie Hauser, Chris Aiken, Bronwen MacArthur, Xan Burley, Alex Springer, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, and Barbie Diewald.
My creative nonfiction, which I write alongside my studio processes, melds dance and cultural studies with memoir, and has been published by The Briar Cliff Review (2021) and The Good Life Review (2021), and I recently won The Good Life Review’s Honeybee Prize in Nonfiction. My poetry has been published in Beyond Words International Literary Magazine (2021) and Griffel (2022).
I have taught dance courses at colleges and universities across the Northeast, including Smith College, Keene State College, Marlboro College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Who makes up your art circle?
Artistic collaborators, fellow dancers, teachers, mentors, students… my teachers’ teachers and their teachers, too. I think all art circles stretch across time, connecting us to our artist lineage as well as to our contemporaries. I also consider the people—dancers, choreographers, visual artists, authors—who inspire me (but who I might not know personally and who might not know me) to be in my art circle, too.
How do you expand your art circle?
I think an openness to being changed—along with a commitment to curiosity—is key to expanding my art circle. Conversation and exchange can only go so far if I remain cemented in my own ideas. I love the informal conversations that lead to unexpected insights, and the everyday interactions that open onto revelation, so I think approaching each day as if everyone and everything is in my art circle also helps to deepen my work and, simultaneously, expand the circle (or perhaps poke more and more holes in the circle).
I am also interested in finding ways of sharing the work of dance that go beyond the moment of performance. Writing has become a crucial way for me to share the what, how, and why of embodied research with a wider public.
What value do you see in having a creative community?
My creative community helps me reconnect to my passion and motivation when things get turbulent, and they encourage me to hold myself accountable if I’ve strayed from my values. In my mind, creative community is also how ideas expand and deepen, and ultimately actualize into creative output.
How does your artistic approach contribute to your community?
My hope is to make work that operates on the level of perception, disrupting habitual ways of relating to self, to others, and to surroundings, and reigniting a sense of wonder and enchantment.
