Queer Bodies in Dance: Talk Back with Neil Greenberg

Neil Greenberg, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a “Bessie” Award, has been creating dances since 1979. He has created over twenty-five works for his company, as well as commissions for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project and Ricochet Dance Company of London. Greenberg came to New York from Minnesota in 1976 and danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1979–1986. He formed Dance By Neil Greenberg in 1986, and his choreography has since been presented in nineteen New York City productions and on tour. He is known especially for his Not-About-AIDS-Dance, for which he received his ‘Bessie,’ which employs his signature use of projected text as a layering strategy that complicates the performance moment while also opening doors into potential meanings in the dance.

He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1992), the National Endowment for the Arts (1988, 1990, 1991–92, 1995–96), the New York Foundation for the Arts (1990, 1996) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1997), as well as repeated support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Harkness Foundation for Dance. He has written about dance and choreography for Movement Research Performance Journal and Ballet Review, and participated in Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence program. Greenberg served as dance curator at The Kitchen from 1995–1999. Greenberg is a sought-after teacher. He currently holds the position of Professor of Choreography and Director of the Dance Program at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, and has also served on the dance faculties of the University of California, Riverside, Purchase College and Sarah Lawrence College, facilitating classes in composition, improvisation, and technique.