Dance Area Talk: Crystal Pite

Tuesday, February 23, 2021 | 12:30 – 2:00 PM (PST) | Zoom

The SCA is excited to present a talk by the internationally acclaimed choreographer, Crystal Pite.

This talk is open to all SCA students, faculty, and staff. Please go HERE to login to find the RSVP link.

Biography

Crystal Pite is a Canadian choreographer and dancer. She began her professional dance career in 1988 at Ballet BC, and in 1996 she joined Ballett Frankfurt under the tutelage of William Forsythe. After leaving Ballett Frankfurt, she became the resident choreographer of the Montreal company Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal from 2001 to 2004.  She then returned to Vancouver where she focused on choreographing while continuing to dance in her own pieces until 2010. In 2002, she formed her own company, Kidd Pivot, which produced her original works Uncollected Work (2003), Double Story (2004), Lost Action (2006), Dark Matters (2009), The You Show (2010), The Tempest Replica (2011), Betroffenheit (2015), and Revisor (2019). Throughout her career, she has been commissioned by many international dance companies to create new pieces, including The Second Person (2007) for Netherlands Dans Theater and Emergence (2009) for the National Ballet of Canada, the latter of which was awarded four Dora Mavor Moore Awards.

In 2010, Kidd Pivot became the resident dance company of the German theatre Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, and for the next three years Pite premiered her work in Frankfurt, Germany. While working in Frankfurt, Pite choreographed The You Show (2010), which explored different types of relationships in various duets, and The Tempest Replica (2011), which was based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. When her arrangement with de:Künstlerhaus Mousonturm expired, she became an Associate Artist with Sadler's Wells' in 2013 and created Polaris (2015), based on Thomas Adès's music, using dancers from both Kidd Pivot and from New York University. Her work Betroffenheit (2015), a piece co-created with collaborator Jonathon Young, premiered at the 2015 Pan American Games. Her most recent work for Kidd Pivot is a new piece, also created with Jonathon Young, called Revisor (2019), which premiered in Vancouver with DanceHouse at The Vancouver Playhouse.

Throughout her career as a choreographer, Pite has choreographed works for world renowned companies such as Nederlands Dans Theatre I, The Paris Opera Ballet, Ballet Jörgen, Ballet BC, Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, Cullberg Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, The Royal Ballet, Ballett Frankfurt, and Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet. She has choreographed over 50 works, many of which have been nominated for and won several awards. Currently, while she runs Kidd Pivot, she is also an Associate Artist at Sadler's Wells in London, an Associate Choreographer with Nederlands Dans Theatre in The Netherlands, and an Associate Dance Artist of Canada's National Arts Centre.

In 2018, SFU presented Crystal Pite with a Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa.