WENDY ROGERS
Professor Emeriti
Wendy Rogers has choreographed and performed contemporary dances for over forty years, residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and now in Riverside, California where she joined the University of California dance faculty in 1996. She has worked in projects produced by choreographers Margaret Jenkins, Carolyn Brown, Sara Rudner; composers John Luther Adams, Paul Dresher; and in one instance on the moon of Endor, filmmaker George Lucas. The Wendy Rogers Dance Company (1977-90), and subsequent ten-year projects MAKESHIFT dancing and WENDY ROGERS dancing, toured nationally and internationally. In her multi-year projects, dances focused by singular concepts evolve and morph into specific performances allied to occasion and place. She has received Fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Irvine Fellowship in Dance, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a 2009 Fulbright Fellowship in Malaysia. Rogers’ current project See What Happens (2011- ) rekindles past dancing and artistic relationships through ‘REPO’ – the recovering and altering of histories at play in the making of new work.
“Everything she does is plain and vigorous and interesting, whether she’s running nowhere or putting her head and hands to the floor and slowly turning in a deep lunge.”
“I also like her air of thinking things through – a quiet seriousness often undermined by impulsiveness. She can go from lying on the ground checking her watch to a prizefighter’s sparing advance as if they connect quite naturally in her mind.”
— Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice, February 9, 1993
“The entire evening was austere, private, mystifying, sometimes magical. …The performance belongs to the time, which I’m beginning to fear is over, when people voluntarily left their homes to gather attend the expressions of others, when we looked to art to challenge a sedate status quo, to provide disturbing and transcendent visions.”
— Elizabeth Zimmer, The Sentinel, May 21, 1992
“Wendy Rogers is a thinking woman’s choreographer.”
— Rita Felciano, The Bay Guardian, May 20, 1992
“…as impressive for its intellectual vigor as for cultural references that flickered with the brief intensity of a firefly’s light.”
— Marilyn Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle, September 10, 1990
“For several years Wendy Rogers has been one of the hidden treasures of the Bay Area dance scene, …the Berkeley-born choreographer works slowly and meticulously, producing new pieces at comparatively long intervals…and shaping them like small, delicate Oriental sculptures.”
“…virtually every one of her appearances has been a treat for the dance aficionados who can still exult in an elegantly composed movement phrase.”
— Allan Ulrich, San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1990