A Minneapolis native, James Sewell moved to New York at age 17 and began dancing with ABT II. He studied at the School of American Ballet, and with David Howard for 15 years. He was a lead dancer with Feld Ballets/NY for six years. He also has performed as a guest artist with the New York City Ballet, Zvi Gottheiner and Dancers and more recently James has worked with Chris Aiken and Kirstie Simson.

Since 1982 James has choreographed more than 60 ballets, including ten for which he composed the music. More than a dozen companies in the United States and Taiwan have performed his ballets. Special projects have included the New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute (2001, 2006); and For the Guthrie Theater; She Loves Me (2005) and 1776 (2007).

James received a 2002 Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship and a 2006 Choo-San Goh Award for Choreography from the Choo-San Goh & H. Robert Magee Foundation.

Artist Philosophy
My vision for the kind of dance I want to create is a seamless blend of movement ranging from contact improvisation to classical and contemporary dancing and partnering. To do this, one must develop dancers and a language capable of drawing fully upon that range and exploring structures that combine the spontaneity that is made possible by improvisation with the security that set choreography provides.

The whole point of this is to create a performing environment in which the dancers feel safe to take extraordinary risks. They can try something that might crash and burn, knowing that exploring that “burn,” when it occurs, can be more interesting than the flight they were attempting.

Within the range of my movement interests is another avenue of choreographic exploration, that of multiple coordination: asking the body to do up to five different things in contrasting rhythms. Multiple coordinations are the antithesis of improvisation. They are not movements like anything that would come out of a body spontaneously. I am curious about what the common ground is between these two different ways of creating (improvisation and choreographing multiple coordinations). The common ground seems to be about “brain power” and the relationship between thinking and dancing.

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