Ana Sánchez-Colberg

Ana Sánchez-Colberg is a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist working internationally. She has been awarded Fellowships by the Swedish Research Council, Arts Council of England, British Council amongst others. She has also been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 2016 and the recipient of the highly coveted MAP Funding (USA) award in 2019, among other awards and recognitions.

Career and Activities

Since 2016 Sánchez-Colberg moves fully into non-stage multidisciplinary/cross-arts works based on experimentation with generative compositional rules to create new forms of collaborative and participatory contemporary art. The works defy categorization as they bring together elements of fine and visual art, audio composition, movement, photography and film, live documentation in works that question the relationship between art institutions, the 'art-object' and the subjects involved in the creation and reception. Her current portfolio can be seen at www.anasanchezcolberg.com. This focus led the establishment of Vision.AI.R-e, a company developing multidisciplinary projects in audiovisual and new technologies.

The film 13.13.13 Archeology of a City has been screened in festivals worldwide and was an award winner at Berlin Indie Festival in 2022. The short film 13 Variables [We are no longer who we were then, in dialogue with Jean Cocteau] was an official selection for the Athens Digital Arts festival 2021 edition, ScreenDance Miami, as well as an official selection for the Berlin International Art Film Festival. The work reimagines Cocteau's Jeune Homme et la Morte from the perspective of the Woman/Death. Love Letters to Ana was part of exhibition Coantivirus curated by NY20+ Nongyuan Culture in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. From there it joined the permanent collection of the channel Six Minutes Past Nine, see the full series at: https://sixminutespastnine.com . The video series is a collaborations between nine international artists during the nine-week period of 'heavy lockdown' in the city of Athens. Ana is the lead artist who invited artists in 'lockdown cities' (from Seoul to Beijing, to Bangkok, Rome, Milan, San Antonio, to name some) to send her an audio 'love letter'. This love letter was used as an audio-score to 'go on a walk' (a poetic slightly ironic variation on the museum audio walk) in the conditions of 'containment'. The letters serve as a cross-border reflection on the shared and distinct conditions of 'lockdown' as well as an exercise in 'recuperation' amidst the loss. Other work in film and documentary includes the collaborations with filmmaker Chris Clow in film and documentary projects that aim to capture the intuitive and ephemeral moments that lead to works of dance. These include Mahler's fifths (2005) Holds No Memory (2005, stage 1) 2006 part 1, 2006 part 2 and We: Implicated and Complicated (2007). The documentary film of the creative process into 45, 46, 47 The Unbearable was premiered at Kinitiras Studio-Residency Centre, Athens on 16 March 2011.

Event/Horizons was an international collaborative project bringing together over sixty-nine performing arts artists across the globe to share practices and concerns in response to the effect of the global pandemic. The project lasted for thirteen months, from October 2020 to December 2021 and concluded in an installation showcasing the work that was generated through the exchange.

In February 2020 she was artistic mentor for the project Grass Stains in Miami, Fl, an initiative of Pioneer Winter Collective. This gathering of twenty-two creators worked under the mentorship and facilitation of Sánchez-Colberg, in a laboratory setting over the course of one week. The MDC Live Arts Lab surrounding MDC Wolfson Campus (Building 1) hosted the artists. The final event curated by Sánchez-Colberg can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/395733654. She will once again curate the event in March 2022.

In 2019 Ana was one of 40 awardees of the prestigious MAP Awards 2019 for the creation of the project 1[-1] Materiality of Exile in collaboration with BoxoPROJECTS. The project was part of a one-month residency at Boxo HOUSE arts centre and focused on migratory histories of the Southwest desert, with a focus on the Latinx community whose identity is marked by migrations and "crossing" through the desert. https://mapfundblog.org/1-1-map-2019/. The archive can be seen at: https://materialityofexile.blogspot.com/ . A second strand 11.11 Materiality of [Contained] Exiles was premiered in a global on-line screening 29/31 May 2020. See https://vimeo.com/showcase/6883129.

Seven to the Seventh, was an unprecedented pre-pandemic global project that connected synchronically artists and their communities across seven time zones, using mobile technology throughout seven days 24–30 June 2019. The event was made possible with the support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. By the end of the week over 3.4k people had participated in the event either remotely through mobile platforms or at one of the multiple international sites. See https://vimeo.com/showcase/6273097 for the documentation of the Athens event.

J[us]t 5 in collaboration with art curators CHEAPART.GR evolved between 2017 and 2018 across various contexts including the biennale Art-Athena International Arts Fair and Return to Athens Festival. The works were a series of site-responsive public interventions throughout the city of Athens.

J[us]t 5 REDUX an immersive installation that 'collected' previous events into a single locality was presented within the Athens International Festival in June 2018. The work interweaved the collected narratives of the artist as she travelled through various cities- each city bringing her back to her relationship with Athens- raising questions about art, her collaborators, immigrant identity, the challenges and possibilities of life in the city in this precise historical moment. The artist created the participatory event as well as composed the audio soundscape/ score that the public used to follow the event. See https://vimeo.com/channels/570376/287799153.

The project Micropolies: Invisible Cities (February – May 2019) consisted of a series of public participatory interventions in the cities of Byblos (Lebanon), San Juan (Puerto Rico), Miami (Florida USA), Stockholm (Sweden), Athens (Greece). The project dispensed with the presence of the artist, the general public was invited to gather and 'perform' invisible solos by following an audio score (created by the artist) and a task score delivered through mobile technologies. See https://vimeo.com/showcase/6352708

The Sky Leans on Me, (me the one horizontal amongst all the verticals) created as part of the Benaki Museum, Athens Out/topias Exhibition, the largest European exhibition that year on art in public and outside spaces (see: https://vimeo.com/210896650) in November 2016. The work was an open invitation to participate in rethinking the public nature of the museum space and consider ways in which the art form is held between the artist (who opens the space) and the audience (invited to inhabit and transform it).

Sánchez-Colberg was the founder and director of Theatre enCorps, a UK based dance theatre company between 1989 and 2021. www.theatreencorpscollectif.com.

Sánchez-Colberg has worked with many international companies. She has produced four commissioned pieces for Ballet Concierto de Puerto Rico: Ojos Que No Ven (1992), which received the first prize in the Festival of Caribbean Choreographers and has been subsequently performed as part of Ballet Concierto's performances in New York's Lincoln Center and the Wuppertal Opera House, Sartorii (1994), Entre Huella y Pisada (1996), which received various awards from the Corporation for Music and Scenic Arts (NEA), and Tejiendo Memorias (1998). She produced a piece for the ballet of the Staatstheater Cottbus, es lasst sich nicht lesen.. with support from the British Council (Berlin). Strange Muse, produced in June 1997, was commissioned by the Institute of Culture of Puerto Rico in collaboration with musicians from the Puerto Rico Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1997 she premiered a work for Foreign Bodies Dance Company developed with support from East Midlands Arts. She has also choreographed Recollections (1999) for Andanza (Puerto Rico), and Cuerpos (no) Mienten (2012) a group dance for seven dancers with an original composition by composer Kiriakos Spirou for three pianos for CoDA 21 (Puerto Rico). She was resident choreographer with Andanza, Contemporary Dance Company of Puerto Rico 2022-23 where she has choreographed Janus (2022), Tales of Mother Goose (2022), a collaboration with the Symphony Orchestra of Puerto Rico and Quincunx(2023). With Andanza, she directed and curated Festival Video [An]Danza International. She established Festival Videodanza de Puerto Rico, an initiative of Vision.AI.R-e.www.festivalvideodanzapr.com

Since 2023, she is part of the Faculty of Dance at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity where she mentors the Final Tuning Artistic Residency.

Artistic Research and Pedagogy

Sanchez-Colberg was coordinator of the BA Dance (Hons) at Laban (now Trinity/Laban, London) from 1994 to 2002. In 2002 she designs and leads the MA European Dance Theatre Practice and contributes to the MA Choreography and Pd D supervision. In 2005 she takes on the position of coordinator of the MA Performance Practices and Research at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (London), where she also leads the MPHil/Ph D degrees until 2009. As part of her position of Professor of Choreography and Composition at the University Dance and Circus Stockholm (2009–2013), Sánchez-Colberg worked in various interdisciplinary projects between dance and new circus including a project with VR/XR director Chris Lane introducing VR to circus artists (October 2021). She was the program coordinator of the MA in Contemporary Circus Practices at University of the Arts, Stockholm (2020-2022), and now continues to teach as Visiting Lecturer.

Sánchez-Colberg is a guest teacher in dance schools and festivals and has taught in the Tanzwochen/Vienna, International Festival of Theatre in Bogota, Colombia, Helsinki Theatre Academy, University College Dance Stockholm, and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, amongst others. She was also Visiting Professor of Theatre at the Estonia Academy of Music and Theatre contributing to the MA Contemporary Physical Performance Practices and the MPhi/PhD Research degrees.

Her publications can be accessed at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ana_Sanchez-Colberg

Work in Theatre and Performance

Sánchez-Colberg also has a track record in work in theatre and performance. Sánchez-Colberg holds a BA (Hons) Theatre Arts, Magna Cum Laude (with a double major in Drama Literature-20th Century ) from the University of Pennsylvania. As part of the work towards the honours, she followed an independent programme of study leading to a dissertation looking at the 'birth' of physical theatre in relation to changes to theatre and dance practices stemming from the avant-garde of the early 1900s in Europe. The work looked in detail at practitioners such as Meyerhold, Copeau, Checkhov, Lecoq, Artaud and Grotowski. The research had a practical dimension in collaboration with the physical theatre company 'Intuitions', a devised-performance based on Euripide's Bacchae for which she did the movement direction as well as played the lead role of Dyonisus.

As movement director for Intuitions, she was involved in three major productions: Alice in Wonderland (1983) (based on the Andre Gregory Performing Garage text of the 1970s), Bacchae – in 84, and Buchner's Woyzzeck(1984). She has also worked with London-based Rougue 28 Theatre Company as performer and movement advisor between 2006 and 2008. Sánchez-Colberg was course leader of the MA Performance Practices and Research at Central School of Speech and Drama (2005–2008), the largest conservatory of drama and theatre in the UK. The MA focusses on physical and interdisciplinary based performance. During this time she was leader of the Dramaturgy strand of the MA Advanced Theatre Practices as well as contributed to various modules in the MA Movement Direction, MA Classical Acting and MA Musical Theatre. She was also PhD supervisor to various theatre and performance research projects ranging from interdisciplinary approaches to puppetry and dance to re-examination of Laban's work in dialogue with the philosophy of Aristotle. Sánchez-Colberg position as an expert practitioner in theatre is confirmed by the many invitations to teach at important international fora as well as the track record of external examination in the area of movement for actors -including examination of PhD level work- at Rose Bruford College (UK), Chichester University (UK), Dartington College (UK), Brunell University (UK), University of Canterbury (UK), Helsinki Theatre Academy (FI).

She is the author of the seminal essay defining physical theatre practice Altered States and Sublimal Spaces: Charting the Road towards a Physical Theatre. First published in the journal Performance Research in 1996, the essay is now included in the reader Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader, edited by John Keefe and Simon Murray. She is the co-author of Dance and The Performative, a key text in dance studies world-wide.

External links

• www.anasanchezcolberg.co – current artistic portfolio
• festivalvideodanzapr.com
• visionairedigitalarts.com
• http://theatreencorpscollectif.com – the official website of Theatre enCorps Collectif
• https://vimeo.com/user8192950 – the vimeo channel of the company