Dance Informa recently had the pleasure of catching up with renowned dancemaker Sidra Bell. We talked about her childhood, her current projects and everything in between. Check it out!

This past January, I had the opportunity to participate in MODULE (Movement Observed During Unique Laboratory Experiments), Sidra Bell’s award-winning bi-annual research laboratory, which provides seven days of intimate creative space to professional dancers. Bell’s durational practice and the movement that emerges from it eludes straightforward explanation. Instead, I accumulated key ideas and phrases throughout the week and pieced them into poetic form.

Dance Informa caught up with Denna Thomsen and Zak Ryan Schlegel of CONGRESS, an exceptional salon-style collective that serves as a platform for cross-genre dance artists. Read on to hear about the intimate environment they’ve created that values open discussion, audience expansion and strengthening the dance community at large.

Dance Informa sat down with Jeff Friedman, founder and director of the MFA Dance Program at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, and got to know just what makes the program so special. To really understand the creative thrust behind the program, you first have to know a few things about its creator.

You might be thinking, performance and philosophy? How could these seemingly distant topics possibly have enough overlap to warrant a dedicated monthly reading group? Dance Informa caught up with Charlotte Farrell, reading group monitor and director of the Center for Performance Research (CPR) based in Brooklyn, New York, to get the answer to this question and many more.

Broadway stars Jacob and David Guzman have been lighting up the stage together for almost 20 years. Growing up, they did everything together — from soccer to tennis to, of course, dancing. They got their dance training at The Gold School under the direction of Rennie Gold (who also has a dancing twin brother, Rhee), a studio in Brockton, Massachusetts, known for its large number of talented male dancers. Other notable alumni are Tim Stickney, Kenny Wormald and Ross LeClair. The twins loved training together and started off performing duets instead of solos, which helped them “compete with each other and not against each other,” says David.