Sidra Bell Dance New York

The Artist

“More than a choreographer, a creator of scenic worlds,” Sidra Bell is the mastermind behind contemporary dance company Sidra Bell Dance New York (SBDNY). Currently a Master Lecturer at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and an Adjunct Professor at Ball State University in Indiana, Bell was artist in residence at Harvard University, and was an Adjunct Professor at Barnard College in New York City. She has a BA in History from Yale University and an MFA in Choreography from Purchase College Conservatory of Dance.

Bell has won several awards, notably a 1st Prize for Choreography at the Solo Tanz Theater Festival in Stuttgart, Germany in 2011 for Grief Point. and a 2015 National Dance Project Production Award from the New England Foundation for the Arts. The latter of which is sponsoring the world premiere of SBDNY’s Mönster Outside in New Orleans, November 2017 in collaboration with Sweden’s New Tide Orquesta and Visual Relief. Her work has been seen throughout the United States and in Denmark, France, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey, Slovenia, Sweden, Germany, China, Canada, Aruba, Korea, Brazil, and Greece. The company was lauded as #1 in Contemporary Dance by the Pittsburgh Examiner in 2014 for garment, in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette’s 2010 Best in Dance for ReVUE, and in the 2012 Year in Review in ArtsATL’s notable performances for Nudity.

Bell was a cultural ambassador in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2014 and 2015 (made possible by Movement Research, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and Derida Dance Center). In 2015 she collaborated with the internationally acclaimed women’s chorus Karmina Slovenica in Slovenia.

Sidra Bell is a sought after master teacher and her alternative pedagogy, Contemporary Systems- an interior & material approach was featured in Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher Magazine and Dance Studio Life Magazine. She has taught her unique creative practice at major institutions for dance and theater throughout Canada, Europe, South America, and the United States. She is the Creative Director of MODULE a New York City based immersive laboratory for movement and theater artists.

The Artistry

Sidra Bell Dance New York, is a boutique brand of prolific movement illustrators based in New York City that presents and fosters innovative and progressive dance theater in a world of ideas. SBDNY is rapidly gaining an international profile for work that reveals aspects of the human condition through a distinctly female lens.

SBDNY has performed extensively throughout the USA, Europe, Canada, and South America. Bell’s process is intuitive, collaborative, and emphasizes the integration of multiple design elements into a singular vision of contemporary dance.

Sidra Bell is an in-demand educator and has won several awards as well as many commissions from institutions internationally. She has produced over 100 new works notably for BODYTRAFFIC, Ailey II, The Juilliard School, Harvard University, Boston Conservatory, River North Dance Chicago, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Sacramento Ballet, Ballet Austin, Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet School, LEVYdance, Robert Moses’ KIN, METdance, Visceral Dance Chicago, Springboard Danse Montréal, Uppercut Dansteater (Denmark), and Motto Dans Kolectif (Turkey) to name a few.

Her work has been seen throughout the United States and in Sweden, Denmark, France, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey, Germany, Slovenia, China, Canada, Aruba, Korea, Brazil, and Greece. SBDNY has an extensive educational and mentorship program built on MODULE philosophy and works with institutions for dance and theater internationally with a particular emphasis on young artist development.

Awards:

  • National Dance Project Production Award from New England Foundation for the Arts 2015 for a new work MÖNSTER OUTSIDE
  • SIDRA BELL DAY named in White Plains, NY- February 3. Proclaimed by Mayor Thomas Roach of White Plains, New York in 2017
  • Named one of 50 outstanding artists living or working in Westchester County as part of ArtsWestchester’s 50th Anniversary in 2015.
  • 1st Prize Choreography, International Solo Tanz Theater Festival 2011 for Grief Point. (Stuttgart, Germany)
  • 1st Prize Dancer, International Solo Tanz Theater Festival 2011 (Grief Point.) for performer Moo Kim (Stuttgart, Germany)
  • 2nd Prize Dancer, International Solo Tanz Theater Festival 2009 (Conductivity) for performer Shamel Pitts (Stuttgart, Germany)

Photo credits: Umi Akiyoshi Photography unless otherwise noted

SBDNY

 i n | c u l m i n a t i o n

SBDNY

2014-2015 Season

Sidra Bell Dance New York

What Others Say

2010 Best in Dance (for ReVUE) “It was a ReVUE unlike any other, a blend of vaudeville, Fellini, and Cirque du Soleil. Ms. Bell proved that she had her finger on the future of dance where ballet and hip-hop coexist on the same plane.” – Pittsburgh Post Gazette

#1 in Contemporary Dance in 2014 (for garment) “The New York choreographer wowed the audience in a thought-provoking piece focused on identity. Her company members were some of the most unique and talented artists I had ever seen, and her choreography exploded with creativity.” – Pittsburgh Examiner

Notable Performances of 2012- The Year in Review (for Nudity) “Perhaps the most profound gift that Tanz Farm has offered to the Atlanta community, so far, has been to present Sidra Bell Dance New York. Bell’s dancers brought a concentration of immediacy and edge to her new work, Nudity. The quintet created a personal yet formally conceived world where imperfections help define human beauty”– ArtsATL

“Bell has a lot working in her favor: powerful, daredevil dancers and an almost garish imagination capable of dreaming up surreal scenarios… a slick, in-your-face intensity dominates her onstage worlds.”– New York Times

“Bell & her company are at the forefront of innovative contemporary dance.”– The Vancouver Sun

“Bell’s company is regularly in demand throughout the world, and critics are more and more frequently identifying her as one of the most intriguing and significant choreographic voices of her generation.” – Creative Loafing Atlanta

“brainy, exuberant audacity”– San Francisco Chronicle

“rising star”– Pittsburgh City Paper

“incomparable”– Vancouver’s CTV

“Bell is a complete creature of the theater… the ferocious physicality of her dance making is its most attractive quality”– San Francisco Guardian

“Bell’s dance-theater works are intensely physical, concentrated and mysterious- yet they reveal the inner aspects of the performers with startling clarity”– The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“at once creepy and comical”– Washington Post

“fearless, technically honed dancers”– Vancouver’s Georgia Straight

“Bell has an approach to the body; a deconstructor, hyperarticulator that makes her dancers look inhuman like broken marionettes or robots on the fritz…the grotesquerie suggests decadence, disease, a horror show…”– The New Yorker

“Bell represents total experimentation. She’s near controversial. She has a very strange gestural world and is not apologetic about it.”- Choreographer/Curator Lauri Stallings in ArtsATL

“The worlds enacted by Sidra Bell across her expansive repertory are sumptuous facades. For Bell, every show seems to be a disappearing act behind myriad screens- garish costumes, jet- speed movements, blank stares and emptier smiles. Her performers are always self-consciously performing and her shows never forget their over-determined status as objects of fascination and opportunities for exhibitionism. The choreographer often borrows the tropes of performance to flesh out the contours of her world, seeing the stage as if through cinematic studies of it. This is an important, if subtle, point about Bell’s work — it arrives as so many copies of itself. It draws the spectator in through its use of customary conventions, but resists delivering on these terms. Behind the curtain, there is no wizard, only more curtains to be drawn back as the spectator crawls deeper into the world this artist has shaped.” – Written by Danielle Goldman, Ryan Kelly, and Sarah Maxfield (Dance Theater Workshop 2010-2011 Writers)

“Watching Bell’s work is like entering a mysterious couture circus. Her strikingly costumed dancers isolate body parts like puppets within her highly designed movement.” – Dance Teacher Magazine

“More than a choreographer, a creator of scenic worlds, Bell shares her way of work in Bulgaria for a second time. It stands out with a memorable and original movement language, which speaks about concrete principals, truths, and intuitions from a world of knowledge. She unites the presence and the behavior of the dancers, the text, the sound design and the choreography in a dazzling stream of forces. The dancers looked like creatures from a world of dreams, out of our physical dimension.” -Bulgarian Theater Critic- Elena Angelova

“The dance, the music follows the logic of a fever dream, conjuring surreal, alienating sensations. Nudity is undeniably fascinating to watch… you have to admire the utter fearlessness of its dancers“- Vancouver Georgia Straight

“If quirky, kinky movement is your thing, this is the place to be.”– The Village Voice