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Sally Gross (choreographer)
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Sally Gross (choreographer)
Sally Gross (née Sarah Freiberg; August 3, 1933 – July 20, 2015) was an American postmodernist dancer.
Freiberg was a Lower East Side-born American dancer, choreographer and teacher of dance from her beginnings in the avant-garde NYC art world in the 1950s until her death. Later known as Sally Gross, she was a notable participant of the avant-garde dance group called the Judson Dance Theater during the 1960s. Gross died in Sag Harbor, New York on July 20, 2015, aged 81, from ovarian cancer.
Gross, the youngest child of Jewish immigrant parents from Poland, was born on the Lower East Side. She once created a dance based upon her experiences assisting in her father's pushcart vending business, speaking Yiddish, her first language. A graduate of Washington Irving High School and Brooklyn College, she continued to live and work in New York City throughout most of her life.
She began her dance training at the Henry Street Settlement House, where innovative modern dance choreographer, composer and designer Alwin Nikolais was in residence by 1948, developing his abstract cross disciplinary performance style. Perhaps this experience inspired her lifelong search for diverse approaches to movement, from which she evolved her uniquely spare and personal performance works. Her lifelong studies also included classes and workshops with the modern dancers Erick Hawkins, James Waring, Merce Cunningham and Anna Halprin, in addition to ballet, classical Japanese dance, traditional Balinese dance, the neuro-muscular-skeletal re-education systems of Mabel Elsworth Todd, Lulu Sweigard and Charlotte Selver, yoga, and tai chi.
Perhaps the first major art work Sally Gross appeared in was the iconic Beat Generation 1959 film by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy, where she played the bishop's sister. She was one of the original participants in the choreography classes offered by musician Robert Dunn at Merce Cunningham's Studio starting in 1960, where he applied ideas from music composition, particularly the chance systems associated with John Cage, to dance composition. She continued to participate in Dunn's classes when they moved into the basement gym of Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Those sessions led directly into the formation of what became known as the Judson Dance Theater Workshop, founded on rigorously democratic and egalitarian principles that, especially with its rejection of super-technical achievements, was shocking to the establishment dance world of its day but is now regarded as a pivotal cross-disciplinary movement that advanced expanded definitions and tools for dance in particular and performance in general.
During the early 1960s, Gross performed in the company of Merle Marsicano, whose abstract choreography paralleled abstract expressionism then considered the avant-garde in the visual arts, and where she was likely introduced to the approaches to movement based on the ideokinesis system of Lulu Sweigard, as Marsicano had been her long-time assistant.
By 1962 she began a lifetime of yearly performances of her own works in small loft theaters, galleries, churches, outdoor festivals, Merce Cunningham's studio and her own Westbeth studio, besides respected downtown art venues such as the DIA Center for the Arts, the Joyce Soho and Joyce Theater, and The Construction Company. Performing both as a soloist and with her company that usually consisted of women only, she carefully honed her works in collaborations with longtime company members including her daughters, Sidonia and Rachel, and later regulars Jamie Di Mare, Heather Lee, Tanja Meding and Gabriela Simon. Another long-time collaborator was lighting designer Blu, whose work frequently garnered praise, for being "poetic" and "painterly." She also performed in works by Yvonne Rainer, Judith Dunn, Elaine Summers, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson, among others.
In addition to teaching dance technique, movement workshops, tai chi, improvisation and choreography classes in her studio, Gross taught at City College of New York for many years, at Fordham University and CUNY/Kingsborough College. She was honored with a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, a Harkness Foundation for Dance award, a 2000 Tanne Award and was a multiple year recipient of the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust/Live Music or Dance Award.
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Sally Gross (choreographer)
Sally Gross (née Sarah Freiberg; August 3, 1933 – July 20, 2015) was an American postmodernist dancer.
Freiberg was a Lower East Side-born American dancer, choreographer and teacher of dance from her beginnings in the avant-garde NYC art world in the 1950s until her death. Later known as Sally Gross, she was a notable participant of the avant-garde dance group called the Judson Dance Theater during the 1960s. Gross died in Sag Harbor, New York on July 20, 2015, aged 81, from ovarian cancer.
Gross, the youngest child of Jewish immigrant parents from Poland, was born on the Lower East Side. She once created a dance based upon her experiences assisting in her father's pushcart vending business, speaking Yiddish, her first language. A graduate of Washington Irving High School and Brooklyn College, she continued to live and work in New York City throughout most of her life.
She began her dance training at the Henry Street Settlement House, where innovative modern dance choreographer, composer and designer Alwin Nikolais was in residence by 1948, developing his abstract cross disciplinary performance style. Perhaps this experience inspired her lifelong search for diverse approaches to movement, from which she evolved her uniquely spare and personal performance works. Her lifelong studies also included classes and workshops with the modern dancers Erick Hawkins, James Waring, Merce Cunningham and Anna Halprin, in addition to ballet, classical Japanese dance, traditional Balinese dance, the neuro-muscular-skeletal re-education systems of Mabel Elsworth Todd, Lulu Sweigard and Charlotte Selver, yoga, and tai chi.
Perhaps the first major art work Sally Gross appeared in was the iconic Beat Generation 1959 film by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy, where she played the bishop's sister. She was one of the original participants in the choreography classes offered by musician Robert Dunn at Merce Cunningham's Studio starting in 1960, where he applied ideas from music composition, particularly the chance systems associated with John Cage, to dance composition. She continued to participate in Dunn's classes when they moved into the basement gym of Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Those sessions led directly into the formation of what became known as the Judson Dance Theater Workshop, founded on rigorously democratic and egalitarian principles that, especially with its rejection of super-technical achievements, was shocking to the establishment dance world of its day but is now regarded as a pivotal cross-disciplinary movement that advanced expanded definitions and tools for dance in particular and performance in general.
During the early 1960s, Gross performed in the company of Merle Marsicano, whose abstract choreography paralleled abstract expressionism then considered the avant-garde in the visual arts, and where she was likely introduced to the approaches to movement based on the ideokinesis system of Lulu Sweigard, as Marsicano had been her long-time assistant.
By 1962 she began a lifetime of yearly performances of her own works in small loft theaters, galleries, churches, outdoor festivals, Merce Cunningham's studio and her own Westbeth studio, besides respected downtown art venues such as the DIA Center for the Arts, the Joyce Soho and Joyce Theater, and The Construction Company. Performing both as a soloist and with her company that usually consisted of women only, she carefully honed her works in collaborations with longtime company members including her daughters, Sidonia and Rachel, and later regulars Jamie Di Mare, Heather Lee, Tanja Meding and Gabriela Simon. Another long-time collaborator was lighting designer Blu, whose work frequently garnered praise, for being "poetic" and "painterly." She also performed in works by Yvonne Rainer, Judith Dunn, Elaine Summers, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson, among others.
In addition to teaching dance technique, movement workshops, tai chi, improvisation and choreography classes in her studio, Gross taught at City College of New York for many years, at Fordham University and CUNY/Kingsborough College. She was honored with a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, a Harkness Foundation for Dance award, a 2000 Tanne Award and was a multiple year recipient of the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust/Live Music or Dance Award.