Tere O'Connor

Tere O'Connor

Tere O’Connor has been making dances since 1982 and has created over 35 works for his company. His company has performed throughout the U.S. and in Europe, South America and Canada. O’Connor has created numerous commissioned works for dance companies around the world, among these have been works for the Lyon Opera Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, de Rotterdamse Dansgroep, Dance Alloy, and Zenon. In additions to his 1996 work Greta in a Ditch for White Oak, he also created a solo work for Mikhail Baryshnikov. He is recently created a solo for Jean Butler, which premiered in May 2010 at the Dublin Dance Festival.

Tere O'Connor is a 2001 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow. He is a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Award, Arts International’s DNA Project Award, and a Creative Capital Award. He has received three New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awards - One for Heaven Up North in 1988, another in 1999 for Sustained Achievement, and most recently for his work Frozen Mommy (2005).

O’Connor is a recipient of a 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also a recipient of repeated grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, NEFA/National Dance Project,The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Map Fund, Jerome Foundation, Altria Group, Inc., Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, and Mid Atlantic US Artists International.

A much sought after teacher, O'Connor has taught at the Bates Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, Colorado Dance Festival, Ohio State University, University of Minnesota, Arizona State University, at the School for New Dance Development (The Netherlands), and Tanzwochen (Austria), among others. He is currently a professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Visiting Artist | July 30 – August 16, 2009

Wrought Iron Fog

O'Connor's investigations into the philosophical potential of dance have transformed his work, resulting in a stripped down form where choreography is the protagonist. During this residency O'Connor and his performers focused on a core drama in dance - the tension between fixed states and constant change. As one image contextualizes the next, ‘change’ becomes a central contributor to the creation of meaning in dance. O’Connor noted prior to the residency an interest in "bringing the experiential qualities of watching dance into this investigation embracing audience perception as an element of change." In imitation of this he incorporated the performers as audience as the work was built, embracing their subjective projections, normally embedded in nuanced interpretations, into the making of the dance. Each dancer could alter the material in his/her own way in a back and forth editing dialogue with O'Connor. The final result was a braiding of all these single investigations, which O'Connor shared as a work in progress at the 2009 MANCC FORUM.

Wrought Iron Fog premiered in November 2009 at Dance Theater Workshop.

Collaborators in Residence: Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, Matthew Rogers, Erin Gerken and Daniel Clifton [performers]. Slideshow photos by Kathryn Noletto Felis.

Visiting Artist | January 16 – February 5, 2005

Baby

O'Connor was one of the first artists in residence at MANCC. The residency was structured to provide support for O'Connor's research without consideration for what would be produced as a result of his investigations. During the residency, O'Connor opened up rehearsals for students and faculty to observe and reflect with he and his dancers. Participants in a composition class were offered the opportunity to build upon some of his ideas with the performers. This early residency was rich wtih possibility thanks to the generosity of O'Connor and his dancers.

O'Connor credits the residency as helping develop BABY, a continuation of his deep immersion into the poetics of dance exploding the metaphor of "time passing" into a dynamic, contemporary work of art.

BABY premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in March, 2006.

Collaborators in Residence: Hilary Clark, Erin Gerken and Matthew Rogers [performers]