Stephan Koplowitz2004

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Twenty years ago, shortly after beginning to create dances for the proscenium stage, Stephan Koplowitz started making large scale, big cast performances for grand public spaces including the British Library, the windows of Grand Central Terminal, Union Station, the Whale Room at The American Museum of Natural History, and a coal processing plant in Essen, Germany. Altering urban daily life by means of temporal spectacle, his dances simultaneously celebrate and critique public architecture and institutions. From web work to the upcoming Camera Obscura Project, where room size cameras will record live performances, Koplowitz continues to investigate interactive possibilities between choreography and technology. Beginning as an interactive web site, using the submissions of 200 people, Webbed Feats: Bytes of Bryant Park, a seven-hour performance festival in New York, included poetry, theatre and music. This year, the site-adaptive* work, The Grand Step Project, for 100 dancers and singers, will take place on landmark staircases throughout New York City.
 
"I have been increasingly committed to working as a public artist, creating performances for diverse audiences in architecturally compelling and challenging spaces. Combining people and ideas in new contexts, I ask dancers to be singers, actors to be dancers, mixing generations, physical types and backgrounds. I am interested in making the commonplace into something fresh, and hopefully, extra-ordinary. Informed by a site's design, history and current use, a kind of canvas of human endeavor, I explore the relationship between people and their communities. Artistic work is an act of communication; it doesn't exist in a vacuum."