Jill Johnson, Mario Zambrano Named 2009 Artists In Residence At The New School

Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts has named renownEd Forsythe dancers and educators Jill Johnson and Mario Zambrano as the 2009 Artists in Residence at The New School. Johnson and Zambrano will create with the students an original work inspired by One Flat Thing, reproduced, a work by choreographer William Forsythe of The Forsythe Company, which premiered in 2000.

The residency will begin with a series of intensive workshops focusing on Forsythe movement technologies as well as lectures about Mr. Forsythe's approach to dancing and choreographic development. Students will collaborate with Johnson and Zambrano to create an original work inspired by William Forsythe's One Flat Thing, reproduced in the Lang Spring Dance Performance on Friday, May 1, at 8:00 pm and Saturday, May 2, at 2:00 pm and 8:00pm at the Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 West 55th Street. Other choreographers premiering works in the performance include Eric Jackson Bradley, Rebecca Stenn, Takehiro Ueyama, and Karla Wolfangle. Advance tickets are available at the New School Box Office at 66 West 12th Street; call 212.229.5488 or email boxoffice@newschool.edu. For more information, please visit http://www.newschool.edu/lang/events.aspx

Each year, the dance program of Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts invites a distinguished professional artist to work with students for an intensive residency. Historical works give students a direct link to modern dance luminaries through the lineage of their dance disciples. Guest artists teach students the technique, history of the artist and their work as well as the historical, social, political, and/or cultural context of the piece. In addition to research, writing and critical thinking, guest artists work with students in intensive rehearsals to restage a classic work. Reconstructions created in semester or yearlong residencies are performed in the school's spring dance performance. Previous residencies include Martha Graham and Jose Limon.
As a principal dancer with the Frankfurt Ballet, the internationally acclaimed professional company which William Forsythe was the artistic director, Johnson had the opportunity to learn a repertoire of 30 master works, many of which were created with her as a featured soloist within an original cast. Before dancing with William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet, she performed with The National Ballet of Canada over the course of ten years. In 2003, she received the prestigious Annual Critics' Award for the most outstanding dancer, awarded by Balletanz Magazine International. Johnson has created her own work including Four for the Juilliard School, and also choreographs for film and television. After dancing professionally with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Mario Zambrano at only seventeen years of age received the Princess Grace Award. Zambrano has travelled the world dancing for William Forsythe in The Ballet Frankfurt as well as Ohad Naharin in Tel Aviv (Batsheva Dance Company), Jiri Kylian in Holland (Nederlands Dans Theatre), and Twyla Tharp to name a few.

William Forsythe is recognized as one of the world's foremost choreographers. His work is celebrated for reorienting the practice of ballet from its identification with classical repertoire into a dynamic 21st-century art form. In 1994, Forsythe virtually reinvented the teaching of dance with his pioneering and award-winning computer application «Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye» which is used by professional companies, dance conservatories, universities, post-graduate architecture programs and secondary schools.

With a diversity of students, faculty, and academics, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts is a seminar-style liberal arts college located in New York City that was established in 1985. Remaining consistent to its founding philosophy, Eugene Lang College grew out of a highly progressive freshman-year program developed at The New School in 1973. Lang offers intensive liberal arts study as well as a faculty committed to teaching undergraduates in an interdisciplinary context. The Arts Program at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts integrates the disciplines of theater, dance, music, and visual arts into a single curriculum. The program provides students with maximum exposure to different kinds of art, and gives a social and intellectual context to the art they are studying and how it is made collaboratively. For more information, visit www.lang.newschool.edu