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By Catherine Tharin
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Published on May 8, 2025
Awaken at Multicultural HS Brooklyn. Photo: courtesy of ASDT
Don't Miss Amanda Selwyn Dance Theater at New York Live Arts from May 8-10, 2025
Amanda Selwyn Dance Theatre presents World Premiere of Awaken
25th Anniversary Performance Season
New York Live Arts
May 8 - 10, 2025, 7:30 PM
Click HERE for tickets
Amanda Selwyn, founder and artistic director of Amanda Selwyn Dance Theater, marks 25 years of performance and resilience this weekend with the world premiere of Awaken at New York Live Arts. Blending original movement with evocative excerpts from her extensive repertory, Selwyn delves into the tension between distraction, the search for certainty, and the challenge of inhabiting the present moment. Her athletic choreography brings urgency and clarity to the struggle to remain grounded and connected in a world that constantly pulls us away.
Recently, I spoke with Selwyn about her upcoming show, her almost one-year-old studio, her commitment to education and the community, and her advice for anyone who dares to pursue the uncertainty of a dance career.
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Catherine Tharin for The Dance Enthusiast: 25 years leading a dance company is a considerable accomplishment given the vagaries of funding, injury, short tenures, affordable studio space, the limited number of publications that review, and good old emotional support. How have you managed?
Amanda Selwyn: It all starts for me with community. The first thing I did to start this company was to create a choreographer’s workshop. I aimed to create a space that nurtured process. From there, I have been grateful to develop a community of collaborators, volunteers, and supporters who have continued to show up for me and this company year after year. My costume designer has worked with me since 2001, and my sound designer since 2006. I have an emeritus board member who tends bar at most of our events. I have company dancers who have worked with me for 11, 12, and 13 years. And on and on. This network has inspired me, pushed me, and held me up when I had to double down and lean into resilience when things went awry, funding disappeared, equipment broke, we lost access to space, injuries happened, you name it. What I have learned more than anything is to be adaptable.
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This season, I hired apprentice dancers who are understudying a myriad of roles in the work. This has given us flexibility to accept a range of performance opportunities notwithstanding scheduling challenges. Throughout my 25 years, I focused on a continual growth mindset — refining the movement, the process, and the vision.
With an eye towards growth, disappointments come in stride; I keep putting one foot literally in front of the other. Gratefully, I started with a strong and relentless drive and passion to create. Building the dance education program alongside developing my choreographic work has allowed me to create a sustainable, inclusive, and expansive dance organization. I have always felt that you cannot create a dance without considering your audience. And we cannot perform for audiences today without an eye on the audiences of the future.
In a time when studios are closing, you opened a new space on Broadway in downtown Manhattan. How has this ready access to a studio affected your dance-making?
We signed the lease in August 2024 and spent the fall building the dance floor and a kitchen, improving the lighting, and equipping the space to be adaptable to our diverse portfolio of programming. Then, in late December, we started rehearsing, having classes, and even presenting performances in the space. To say this has been a game changer is an understatement. Having a home has expanded our ability to work with props and costumes throughout the creative process, expanded the rehearsal schedule, and created a sense of groundedness that has deepened our ability to do everything. Rather than focusing on schlepping and storing, we have been able to share space and time between staff, artists, friends, and supporters. We have been able to slow down and take the time to consider details.
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Your upcoming premiere, Awaken, speaks of living in the here and now rather than feeling distracted and uncertain. You are pulling from your 25 years of dance-making that includes 18 evening-length works and dozens of shorter works. How do you choose which dances, or which sections of dances, to represent?
I have been creating evening-length works since 2006, each in dialogue with the next. Each piece is episodic in nature, with short sections that add up to a whole. Selecting the sections to include was super challenging because not only did I want to pick showstoppers from over the years, but I was also most interested in creating a new arc to the piece with its own journey and story to tell.
I started with the iconic ASDT classics and, working with the theme of living in the present, pieced together complementary sections that built out a new way of experiencing the work.
I collaborated with percussionist jojo Soul who composed original music, and plays live in the production. Working with jojo, we found some central musical ideas to create continuity and structure between the repertory sections. Likewise, working with my scenic designer Rob Dutiel and costume designer Anna-Alisa Belous, we re-visited original designs and then played with how they interacted with one another.
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You have a strong connection to the NYC public schools. Tell us about your educational programs, and the ways in which your approach is unique.
I have been teaching dance and theater for as long as I have been creating it. As I developed my identity as a teacher, I refined my creative process. By learning how young people approach creativity, I crafted tools and methods to inspire and unburden adults in their creative expression. I developed ASDT education program, Notes in Motion, in our first years of operating by bringing lecture/demonstrations and workshops to the NYC schools.
In 2005, we got our vendor license from the NYC Department of Education and our partnerships throughout the city have flourished ever since. In contrast with ASDT’s professional work, which is grounded in modern dance and dance theatre, Notes in Motion education programs traverse all styles of dance. Our teaching artists teach ballet, jazz, African, Latin dance, hip hop, musical theater, modern, tap, and more. The Movement Exchange Method, our signature pedagogy that connects all programs, combines technical instruction with creative expression, improvisation, and choreography.
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In all programs, we empower young people to connect with dance as a mode of individual and community expression, to experience cultural dance forms and history, and to find freedom and joy through movement. In 2024-2025, we will bring over 130 programs to 85 NYC schools in all five boroughs — programs during the school day, after-school, and community events for families out of school time. In addition, ASDT is performing nine previews of Awaken at partner schools throughout the city!
What drives you?
What drives me is my interest in what connects us all as humans — the struggles that feel so individual yet are incredibly universal.
In addition to my work as a choreographer, I have a theater background and am also a yoga teacher. My theater background has definitively influenced the theatricality and emotional qualities of my work. My yoga practice has magnified and focused my pursuit to live a fully embodied life in the present moment. In my artistic work, I work out facing obstacles, practicing discernment, growing in relationships, developing more inner trust and wisdom with time. I dramatize these central questions in my choreography. I aim for audiences to find a connection in the personal and emotional expression of the dancers. Through these connections, the viewer is brought into the experience, is engaged, and makes connections as to how they show up in their lives, and how we all can get better at getting out of our own way.
What is your advice to the up and coming?
I always say to the young dancers, it's a marathon, not a sprint. We want to be able to sustain ourselves through a long career. Don't burn bridges. Think about the people who you have opportunities to work with and how you could learn from them, and how they could learn from you, and how you can continue to grow. If something isn't a good match for whatever reason along the way, it's an opportunity to grow. I say to my dancers all the time that obstacles are teachers. That's really my mantra, that we always want to learn from every obstacle that's put before us. If we keep doing that then there's no limit to what we can do.
