Beth Soll Bio
Beth Soll's 5-decade journey to where she takes us today.
"...life offers them to me."
I am often struck with the humbling realization that it isn’t me who makes dances; rather, life offers them to me, and they somehow enter my body and mind.
Then, in the studio, I grapple with what I have been given, and with the help of my dancers, the dances become -- in a transitory, fleeting form -- visible to those who choose to watch them. Beth Soll
Beth's five-decade journey to the present space that she enlivens with dance.
She is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher. Often praised as “the most accomplished choreographer to have emerged from New England,” she is known for her enigmatic and powerfully expressive work. Ms. Soll’s goal is to make dances that evoke feelings, offer insights, and present the viewer with the familiar seen in a new light. She hopes that her work will elicit a wide range of responses from audience members, allowing them to add their own memories and perceptions to the experience of the dance, and to come away with a sense of personal enrichment.
As a child, Soll studied with Romanian modern dancers Iris Barbura and Vergiu Cornea. She later attended the Kurt Jooss School in Essen, Germany, and studied with Harald Kreutzberg in Bern, Switzerland. She continued her dance training in the European and American styles of modern dance at the University of Wisconsin. She earned a Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Modern Dance from Boston University in 1999. Before forming Dance Projects, Inc./Beth Soll & Company in 1979, she performed with companies in the Midwest and Boston, including the Dance Collective , the Ina Hahn Company, and the Harvard Summer Dance Center Company. With her company or as a soloist, she has performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Her interest in collaborative projects has led her to work with other artists from several different creative disciplines.
Soll is a surreal artist with a ‘naif’ iconography. Her subjects are spirituality, sacredness, absurdity . . . I come away from Soll’s concerts feeling that she is near to delivering me somewhere: a space, or a pane where movement will form not a question but an answer.
Laura A. Jacobs, The Boston Phoenix
Expanding her horizons...
Highly qualified and motivated professionals
Since the 1960s, Soll has held teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin, Boston Conservatory, Boston University, the Harvard Summer Dance Center, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where she directed the dance program for 20 years), UC Santa Barbara, Hofstra University, The New School, Manhattanville College, and numerous private and community organizations. She is currently performing and choreographing in New York City. Soll's book, Will Modern Dance Survive? Lessons to be Learned from the Pioneers and Unsung Visionaries of Modern Dance, was published in 2002.
She has choreographed more than 125 dances. Her work has been supported by private individuals and more than 60 grants, including Choreography Fellowships and numerous Dance Company Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, other state and civic agencies, and funding from many private foundations, individuals and corporations, such as Jacob’s Pillow, the LEF Foundation, the Bank of Boston, the Polaroid Foundation, and the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation. She has also received many awards for her work, including Boston Magazine’s “Best of Boston” Award in 1983, the Gyorgy Kepes Fellowship Prize, the Eliot Norton Award, and the Dance Belt Award.
How she gets to you...
The audience trusts [Soll] to know what she’s doing and feels its trust well-founded when, her face, lit as with some inspired question, she launches into one of those forays in undelineated meaning – the Soll solo. This is when her body quivers like a flame, her gait cackles, her face and hands open as if receiving a vision. And she’s a natural comedian, she can sigh for the moon and make you think of Bugs Bunny and Sarah Bernhardt at once.”
Laura Jacobs, The Boston Phoenix.
Beth Soll & Company is an activity of Dance Projects, Inc.
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