CHI Artists Summer Workshop - Peter DiMuro

Peter DiMuro will delve into choreographic and crafting tools for dance, based on his 15 year collaboration in the processes of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.  Dance Exchange's work in multiple communities, and Peter's own focus on fusion of genres and their unique processes of creation inform these tools.  Our over-arcing goal in the workshops will be to erase our own movement and crafting biases and habits,  and replace them with choices more fitting to intended artistic goals.

Over the two week span, we will accumulate daily sessions in a number of methods/tools that can be applied to professional dancers as well as to all ages and abilities. We will explore ways to craft not only dances but processes or those wanting to develop their own skills at designing a development/rehearsal process. Movers and choreographer's alike will both gain practical tools and new skills to be more dimensional practitioners- mover, dancer, choreographer, directors- in dance. 

Students are encouraged to commit to either a full week or both weeks because each class will build on previous work. As much as is possible we will come away each day with new tools and methods- so drop in classes can be possible.

Peter DiMuro

 As a director, teacher, facilitator and arts practitioner, Peter DiMuro has woven a career over a thirty year span bridging classical, post modern, social forms and jazz styles in dance and theatre works. Known for splicing text, image and movement, DiMuro's work crosses genre, community and subject-matter boundaries, evidenced  through the repertory of his  Boston based company, Peter DiMuro Performance Associates and  through his fifteen-year collaboration in the processes of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, serving in several roles including Artistic Director. He joins Drexel University's Dance Department as an Associate Teaching Professor  in the fall of 2012. 

A teacher of technique, creative process, composition/improvisation, Peter has been artist in residence internationally, taught several summers at the Cornerstone Theatre Institute, American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival and adjudicated several American College Dance Festival Association regional gatherings.

Choreographic works include national tours created under the auspices of the Dance Exchange, including the docu-dances of intergenerational gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendererd lives in "Near/Far/In/Out" and the alternative-family inspired "Funny Uncles".  Most recent was a commission from VSA Arts "The Farthest Earth From Thee" was created for a cast of all ages and all physical abilities. In development are works to be produced at Dance Place/DC in summer of 2013 involving several artists from different genres - Hip Hop to ancient Hula-  all creating new work to Rachmaninoff's Preludes, as well as a Tom Waits opera and a play with movement about the final days of Nijinsky.

Peter's work has appeared at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Dance Place and Church Street in DC, and commissioned by the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts, The Florida Dance Festival, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, The Bates Dance Festival, Auras Dance Theatre (Lithuania), Boston Dance Umbrella. His choreography appears in a nationally aired television commercial for the National Institute on Aging. He was named a White House Millennial Artist in 2000, a 1995 Mayor of Boston/ProArts Public Service in the Arts Award recipient, and his work has received grants from the National Performance Network, the Artists' Foundation and Cultural Council, both of Massachusetts, MetLife Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He received an MFA in Dance from Connecticut College under Martha Myers; a BFA in Theatre from Drake University, with continued study in New York, Boston and at the American Dance Festival.