Week 51: CONTEMPORARY & BALLET with Rachel Tess

Rachel Tess is an American choreographer and dancer living and working in Sweden. She is the director of Milvus Artistic Research Center (MARC) in Knislinge (SE) and associate curator for live-art at Wanås Konst. She received a BFA in 2004 from The Juilliard School in New York City. While attending Juilliard, Tess received a Princess Grace Award (2002), performed as a member of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, and was presented with the Martha Hill Dance Award by the faculty.

Tess has been a member of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, Gothenburg Opera Ballet, and held a permanent position with the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm.

In 2013, Tess received her masters in choreography from the New Performative Practices Masters program at DOCH. She won and completed a Princess Grace Foundation Works in Progress Residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City with her ongoing project Souvenir in 2013. Her work Souvenir was exhibited as part of the ‘Dance Me’ exhibition at Wanås Konst in 2014. She was presented by the Lower Manhattan Culture Council, (in collaboration with Princess Grace Foundation USA and Baryshnikov Arts Center) in 2014 and 2015. She was also engaged in the project ‘These are Bodies, These are Motions, This is the Place’ with choreographer/performer Benoît Lachambre, which premiered at Wanås Konst in 2014 and New York City in 2015 at the River to River Festival (hosted by LMCC). As a freelance performer and choreographer she works extensively with Benoît Lachambre, most recently as a performer and assistant for ‘Fluid Grounds’. Her new work Any Number of Sunsets was been presented at Skillinge Teater, Dansens Hus (Stockholm), MDT, Atalante, and Dansstationen in 2019. She has curated and is part of the artistic team for “Still Untitled” by Xavier Leroy and Scarlet Yu (2018, Wanås Konst) as well as a long list of other contemporary choreographers and dance practitioners such as Maria Hassabi, Dinis Machado, Anna Pehrsson, and Marie Topp. She is the 2019 recipient of the prestigious Birgit Cullberg Stipendiat for her work presenting experimental dance in rural areas throughout Sweden.