The Duke Dance Program welcomed award-winning choreographer Dianne McIntyre to campus for a development residency February 21-25, 2022. Ms. McIntyre celebrated 50 years of dance making, and during her residency in the Dance Program, the venerable choreographer was joined by her company dancers and musicians for rehearsals to develop new work titled Speaking in the Same Key. Ms. McIntyre’s work draws on collaborations between dance, live music, poetry and text. This was unique opportunity to connect with inspiring artists at the ground level of the creation of new work.
While on campus, she was in rehearsals with her company on Speaking in the Same Key, and worked with Dance students in several courses.
Ms. McIntyre also took part in an artist talk at 3:00pm on February 24, 2022, at the Rubenstein Arts Center’s Ruby Lounge, where she was joined by Dance Chair Andrea Woods Valdés in conversation.
About:
Dianne McIntyre, a 2020 USA Fellow and 2016 Doris Duke Artist, choreographs for concert, theatre, and film. From 1972-1988 McIntyre's company, Sounds in Motion, toured internationally while at her Harlem studio she taught classes and presented other artists. The studio was a mecca for collaborating artists. McIntyre's work has been seen with Sounds in Motion and her own subsequent ensembles, including at the Joyce, Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Walker, Wexner Center, Lincoln Center, ADF, and New York Live Arts.
Commissions include Dance Theatre of Harlem, Jacob's Pillow, ADF, Dallas Black Dance, Dancing Wheels, Philadanco, GroundWorks, Cleo Parker Robinson, Def Dance Jam, Limon, and multiple academic institutions. She has collaborated with artistic icons Cecil Taylor, Butch Morris, Onaje Allan Gumbs, Max Roach, Regina Taylor, Lester Bowie, Olu Dara and Ntozake Shange and directors Jonathan Demme, Douglas Turner Ward, Irene Lewis, Barlett Sher, Marion McClinton, Oz Scott, Des McAnuf.
For film and television she choreographed "Beloved"; "Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper"; "for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf" and "Miss Evers' Boys" for which she received an Emmy nomination. She also creates dance-driven dramas from her interviews with people on major social/life issues for theatre arenas. These include "Open the Door, Virginia!" (civil rights protest/actions), "I Could Stop on a Dime and Get Ten Cents Change" (her father's stories); "Daughter of a Bufalo Soldier" (early dance pioneer). Signature dance works include: "Take-Of from a Forced Landing", "Deep South Suite", "Life's Force", "Love Poems to God", "Their Eyes Were Watching God".
McIntyre's many other awards, include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Bessies, ADF Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching, Helen Hayes Theatre Award, two Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from SUNY Purchase and Cleveland State University and two AUDELCO awards.
Currently she is the co-director of the Hicks Choreography Fellows Program at Jacob's Pillow and she is the choreographer for Lincoln Center Theater's operatic adaptation of Lynn Nottage's "Intimate Apparel". Mentors: Gus Solomons Jr, Elaine Gibbs Redmond, Vera Blaine.