Barbie Diewald

Barbie Diewald, photo by David Gonsier

Barbie Diewald’s “Eighteen Refrains Re: Rhoda” is a dance for four performers with live and recorded electronics. It is a collage that interleaves threads of cicadas, Beethoven’s Late Quartets, origami fortune tellers, Suzanne Bocanegra’s “All the Petals”, and a catalogue of impossible physiological tasks (turning our blood clear, for example), and each dancer’s personal aesthetics.

Barbie Diewald balances her choreographic work between New York and New England. Her work has been presented at BAM Fisher, Movement Research at Judson Church, the 92nd Street Y, Dixon Place, CPR, BAX, The Chocolate Factory, Gibney Dance Center, The Flea Theater, DNA, The Cunningham Studio, and National Sawdust. Barbie was a 2016 Bogliasco Fellow, and has received support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as residencies at The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, pOnderosa (Germany), Dance NOW at Silo, the Putney School, and Cora Dance. She co-directed TrioDance Collective in New York from 2010-2014, and has recently performed in the work of Bronwen MacArthur, Stephanie Maher, Jen Polins, Katie Martin, and Merce Cunningham (via the Cunningham Trust). She holds a BFA from Millikin University and MFA from Smith College, where she was a Teaching Fellow and Gretchen Moran Scholar. Barbie is an adjunct professor of Dance at Keene State College, and she is on faculty at the Pioneer Valley Ballet. Her current creative home is the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (SCDT) in Northampton, MA, where she is Associate Director of Programming, emphasizing racial and gender diversity, international artists, and support for emerging choreographers.