|
|
|
Peter Sparling Dance Company
Peter Sparling
 Peter Sparling, Artistic Director, is a professor (1984- ) and former chair (1988-95) of the University of Michigan Department of Dance and also Artistic Director of the Ann Arbor-based Peter Sparling Dance Company. A graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and the Juilliard School, he was a member of the Jose Limon Dance Company from 1971-73 and a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company from 1973-87. He recently returned to Graham's company for its Library of Congress performances of "Appalachian Spring" in 1998. As a regisseur of the Martha Graham Trust, he has staged Graham's works on his own company and on companies all over the world.
From 1979-83, he presented his solo concert, Solo Flight, and Peter Sparling Dance Company for five successive seasons at New York's Riverside Dance Festival. Sparling has held residencies at numerous American universities and at the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Australia's Victorian College of the Arts, Portugal's Ballet Gulbenkian, Taiwan's Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, the Bat-Dor Summer Dance Workshop and at the American Dance Festival. He is a recipient of the 1998 Governor's Michigan Artist Award and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, Arts Foundation of Michigan and U/M Rackham School for Graduate Studies. Sparling was a 1996-97 Faculty Fellow at the U/M Institute for the Humanities and 1998 Fellow at the U/M Rackham Summer Interdisciplinary Institute. He has worked extensively with composers, actors, visual artists and scientists to create collaborative performance works. An avid writer and poet, he has written texts for performance and has been published in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
|
