Fostering partnerships across the university and within greater New Haven, the Dance Lab emphasizes creative practice as a unique form of research and window into history. Even as the discipline, ritual, and repetition inherent to dance forms the Lab’s core knowledge, Dance Lab members expand and connect their work to some of the most powerful social and political ideas of our time.
The Dance Lab’s core activities involve the licensing of seminal choreography and/or commissioning of new work. Additional events range from studio-based workshops and professional intensives to talks, screenings, class visits, and various other experiments, explorations, and collaborations launched throughout the year. Past projects include Twyla Tharp (2011), Merce Cunningham (2012), Reggie Wilson (2013), Akram Khan (2013), Trisha Brown (2014), Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (2015), Matthew Rushing (2015), Gaga USA and LeeSaar The Company (2016), Urban Bush Women (2017), Paul Taylor Dance Company (2018), Vicky Shick (2020), Ni’Ja Whitson (2020), Transpositions: dance poems for a digital world (2021), New Haven Dance History Project (2020-2022), and Emily Coates & Lacina Coulibaly/The Rite of Spring (2022-2023). Le Sacre du Printemps (2023) marks the Yale Dance Lab’s first collaboration with the Yale Symphony Orchestra.
The Yale Dance Lab gives heartfelt thanks to William Boughton for proposing this project, and to the Yale Symphony Orchestra and the Yale Schwarzman Center for partnering to make it a reality.