Amplifier marks Anna Sperber’s return to creating work for an indoor theater space after her large-scale out-door performances of the past three years. Amplifier continues Sperber’s experiments with detailed choreographic structures that situate mystery, agency, and aggression within the feminine. The work finds activation and power through collective momentum. Sperber and her collaborating performers Angie Pittman, Myssi Robinson, Emma Judkins and Ariana Speight ride shifting energetic states, letting time bend in shared space. They are buoyed through witnessing one another, and through the partnership of the collective group.
Amplifier readily embraces the dualistic convictions of its five performers. It’s a work concerned with female power, while completely staring into the eye of how such a thing often siloes or subjugates the strength of a body moving, or existing, in space. These are very real bodies, with very real concerns, attempting to both display their outer limits of agility while knowing the stakes of what it means to be too vulnerable, or too grotesque, for a public. We carry the strong belief that our bodies and senses carry the weight of our emotional lives. Through landscapes of both cacophony and silence with an original score by composer Nate Wooley, the performers become satellites of listening and receiving.
Anna Sperber’s choreographic work has been described by The New York Times as “immediately compelling” and “wonderfully strange” with “moments of theatrical magic.” Her performances are rooted in the poetic potency of choreography and its potential for perceptual transformation, embodying a tension between formality and chaotic wildness. Sperber received a 2022 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award for Outstanding Choreographer/ Creator for Bow Echo. Sperber’s work has been commissioned by venues including The Kitchen, The Joyce Theater (Joyce Unleashed), Gibney Dance, The Chocolate Factory, Roulette, Dance Theater Workshop, and the American Dance Festival. She has been an artist in residence as a Schonberg Fellow at The Yard, Bogliasco Foundation, Marble House Projects, MacDowell, Yaddo, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance (Dance in Process), Brooklyn Arts Exchange, LMCC, and Movement Research. Sperber has collaborated extensively with esteemed experimental composers and visual designers. These interdisciplinary collaborations are crucial to the integration of visual and sonic landscapes with the moving body in her work. Sperber was a co-founder of classclassclass, and has taught as a guest artist at American Dance Festival, Movement Research, Freeskewl, Pageant Space, Gibney Dance, Hunter College, George Washington University, and Wayne State University. Sperber founded and ran BRAZIL, a studio and intimate performance space from 2005-2014, and Sunset Space Studio 2019-20.
