Ana Sánchez-Colberg

Ana Sanchez-Colberg (born October 16, 1962) is a London-based Puerto Rican choreographer and dancer. She is a choreographer of dance-theatre. She has been awarded a Fellowship by the Swedish Research Council.

Artistic career

Sanchez-Colberg trained in classical ballet in her native Puerto Rico before turning to contemporary dance. Under the tutelage of Helmut Gottschild (assistant to Mary Wigman in Berlin until 1969) she trained in Wigman, Kurt Jooss and Tanztheater techniques. During this time Sanchez-Colberg was a member of the Terry Beck Troupe, a Philadelphia -based dance company and Movement Co-ordinator for Intuitions, a physical theatre company. During this period she began to create her first works. She was a finalist in the USA Choreographic competitions ACDFA performing the duet Lullabyes at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington DC. The Washington Post described the work as "a gem, demonstrating a creative spark of a higher order". In 1986, under the auspices of a fellowship from the Institute of Culture of Puerto Rico, she moved to England to pursue further dance training. She completed a PhD programme at the Laban Centre London in 1992.

Sánchez-Colberg established Theatre enCorps in 1989 . The debut choreographic work Alice, Alice, Alice...Are You A Child or a Tee totter (1989-1990), was performed in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as a site-specific work at Newcastle Arts Centre, West Greenwich House and in Spring Loaded at The Place Theatre, London in 1990. One review described the work as "imaginative and bold...trenchantly performed" (Time Out, . This was followed by the “spirited solo” (The Stage and Television) Fragments: Discourse on Love (1991-92) performed at the Oval House Theatre. Family Portraits (1993-94) was also performed as part of Continental Shifts at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and was performed in London at The Place Theatre (Evolutions! 1993) and the Bonnie Bird Theatre. En Viva Voz (1995-96) was performed as part of Spring Loaded at The Place Theatre and was awarded the Bonnie Bird Award for Choreography that year. In April 1997 the company produced Now we are no longer who we were then... based on Jean Cocteau’s Jeune Homme et la Mort. She directed, choreographed and produced Futur/Perfekt, an international collaborative performance project exploring the relationship between individual histories, city landscapes and the notion of the global. The project began in Berlin in 1998 and was performed in the USA, Austria, Puerto Rico, Colombia and México.

In 2003 she created Inside Heiner’s Mind, a one-woman solo that has toured internationally. In 2004 with support from the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Theatre Museum Vienna she produced Mahler’s Fifths. The piece was the recipient of the Creative Collaborations in Music Award from PRS for its treatment of dance and "live music" in performance. The piece toured internationally in 2005.

Killing Charity in collaboration with director Niall Rea was premiered as part of Fronteras Latin American festival at the Robin Howard Dance Theatre in October 2004. She has performed in Holds no memory, an Arts Council of England supported collaboration with Swedish choreographer [2]Efva Lilja. [3] We: Implicated and Complicated has been produced with Arts Council of England support and has been performed in London, Stockholm and Vienna.

Sánchez-Colberg has worked with 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 Centre 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 Balletts des 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).

Since 2005 Sanchez-Colberg has been collaborating with filmmaker Chris Clow in various internet-hosted 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 (2005-06) and We: Implicated and Complicated (2007).

Artistic research and pedagogy

Sanchez-Colberg is a regular 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 has worked at centers for dance and theatre training, including the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, the Central School of Speech and Drama, Helsinki Theatre Academy, and most recently the University Dance [4]in Stockholm where she has held the position of Visiting Professor of Choreography since 2005.

She has written an essay on dance theatre and physical theatre. First published in the journal Performance Research under the title “Altered States and Subliminal Spaces”, the essay is now included in the reader Physical Theatres, edited by John Keefe and Simon Murray.

Her essays on developing the notion of practice-based-research with attention to choreographic and performance practices. Her work proposes new relationships between concepts and practice as it pertains to contemporary dance-theatre practice. In “Making the Invisible Visible” she suggests that the aim is to find a method of practice that can capture "the minutia, the fleeting, the subtle, by slowing down the process to find the steps within the steps and as such allow the intelligence of the body to come through and thus ’make explicit’ the intelligence of the body”. For Sanchez-Colberg this “occurs at two mutually influential levels. On the one hand there is the continuous exploration and experimentation with the materials of the medium—whatever we define them to be—as well as the development of shareable artistic skills and methods. On the other, one finds the generation of artistic discourse through which we as artists, educators and industry providers are able to exchange knowledge in and through our various practices."

The essay "Holds No Memory: A proposition as a way to a proposal on Dance”", which discusses the process into the making and performance of the piece of the same title, has been published in Dance in A World of Change (2008).