Amy Chavasse

Amy Chavasse, choreographer, improviser, performer, educator, Artistic Director of ChavasseDance&Performance, is currently a Professor in the Department of Dance. Recent projects include Contact Improvisation at the edge of democracy: improvising new steps from South to North—Buenos Aires, July 18- 31, 2024, as part of the Dance Studies Association’s “Cartographies of Movement conference. Following the conference, she will participate in multiple “catedras” with artists/scholars in Buenos Aires; her duet, Plunder Thunder had performances in Ann Arbor as part of Arts Initiative’s Art & Resistance theme semester alongside two guest artists from Hong Kong and a new solo, Death in Dreams, created and performed by Chavasse; Her work was presented in The New International Dance Festival in Daejeon; The Goyang International Dance Festival, South Korea; How to Stay in a Dream, a video, dance-theater collaboration with Luciana Acuña, Nola Smith, Austin Selden and Patricia Lorena Solòrzano , as guest artists of Compañía Nacional de Danza de Costa Rica. Her work has been presented at Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Movement Research, (New York), The Dance Complex (Boston), NYU, Triskelion (Brooklyn), and other venues; Teatro Traetta (Bitonto, Italy), Teatro Valle (Rome), the 2019Urban Spaces Festival Shanghai; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Uppsala, Sweden; the American Dance Festival/ Henan, and The Beijing Dance Festival. Frequent collaborators include many SMTD Dance alums, and Malcolm Tulip, (Theatre & Drama) and Michael Gould (Percussion). Since arriving at U-M in 2006, she has prioritized creating international connections and opportunities for her own creative research and for her students, including launching the first dance study abroad program in Seville, Spain with Marcat Dance. She’s created several new courses in the Department of Dance that focus on composition, improvisation, dramaturgy, collaborations across diesplines and the creative process. She is the recipient of a SMTD Faculty Recognition Award, and the Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship.