Amy Seiwert

This chapter describes the career of Amy Seiwert, a Bay Area choreographer who, over a period twenty years, moved from neoclassical ballerina to full-time contemporary ballet choreographer with a desire to reformulate the classical dance lexicon. Her goal was to create dances, as well as dance practices, that could maintain the beauty of the classical language while reflecting and commenting on the realities of contemporary life. Thanks to the experimental dance scene in San Francisco, California, she eagerly exposed herself to the many choreographic tools long familiar in contemporary and postmodern dance. These included improvisation, scoring, movement games, and aleatory processes, all of which are organized forms of play. Play, and the agency and daring it requires, brought forth new, imaginative embodiments of movement problems and strategies for Seiwert; through them she has been able to address pressing social and existential questions and prove contemporary ballet’s relevance to the twenty-first century.