Aynsley Vandenbroucke grew up in Chicago and currently divides her time between New York City and the Catskill Mountains. She started dancing in ballet class and living-room-improvisations when she was very young. Her formal dance training included ballet and modern at the Ruth Page Foundation and Lou Conte Dance Studio (home of Hubbard Street) in Chicago. She spent summers studying on grants and scholarships at the Cunningham Studio, The Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, the American Dance Festival, and ImpulsTanz in Vienna. In 1999, she received her BFA from North Carolina School of the Arts where she studied on scholarship and was nominated for the Princess Grace Award.When she was young, dance teachers told Aynsley that she liked to think too much to be a dancer. She thought about it and disagreed. But the supposed tension between being a thinking, creating human and being a dancer has continually inspired her to find her own way within the dance world.
While at North Carolina School of the Arts, she co-founded the Pluck Project, now an annual New York performance of graduating seniors. After NCSA, she quit dance for a while in order to get back in touch with her own reasons for dancing. She wanted to focus less on technique and success, whatever that meant. She realized the best way to find her own place within dance was to create her own company.
Her company, Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group, works collaboratively using improvisation, drawing, writing, and discussion. They also do a lot of thinking. In New York City, the company has performed at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Dixon Place,Joyce SoHo, The Flea, The Brooklyn Museum, and Lincoln Center Institute’s Clark Studio Theater, among others. They also recently went on their first tours to Brazil and San Francisco.
Aynsley has created homes within the dance world in two other primary ways. She and her husband, photographer Mathew Pokoik, founded and direct Mount Tremper Arts, an arts center in the Catskill Mountains. Located near Woodstock and Phoenicia, MTA hosts an annual summer festival and serves as a center for exploration within the fields of performance and the visual arts. On wooded grounds with streams, gardens, and hiking trails, it is also a place in which to connect with the natural world.
Aynsley is also a Certified Movement Analyst on the faculty at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. Here, she gets to question, describe, write about, and dig into all experiences of movement. She is surrounded by people from all fields and walks of life who believe in the power of movement. In Fall of 2009, she will begin teaching dance history and somatics at Lehman College in the Bronx.
Aynsley's approaches to dance and dance-viewing are influenced by her current practices of Zen Buddhism and Gabrielle Roth's 5Rhythms.
My name is Katarzyna Kruczynska and I am a master student at Uppsala University,Sweden writing my dissertation from sociology. The topic of my thesis is :Why do dancers communicate? " and I am interested in the relation between nonverbal and verbal codes in dancing as well as the way in which the experience of dancing is transferred into the world of online blogs.
ReplyDeleteI would like to ask you if it is possible to conduct a short interview with a few of the bloggers about the experience as a dancer and blogger. I understand that the actual meeting maybe difficult but what about an interview via email or skype? I would love to be given a chance to hear about the experiences and I am sure your contribution would mean very much to the progress of my dissertation.
Of course any of the contact details would remain anonymous and would not be included in the text. I am also more than happy to send the dissertation once it is finished.
I'm looking forward to hearing from you
Best regards
Katarzyna Kruczynska