Explore movement with award-winning creator Shamel Pitts, artistic director of Shamel Pitts | TRIBE. This workshop will focus on developing physical efficiency, proficiency, expressive range, and clarity based on creative prompts. Participants will physically examine concepts such as embodied movement sources, aliveness within stillness, dynamics, speed, rhythm, and groove, while incorporating visualization to discover their unique individual expression through dancing in a communal space. This workshop is open to all levels of dancers and available to participants thanks to a partnership between Northrop and TU Dance.

The class is free for University of Minnesota students, faculty, and staff. Registration is required.

This class has a limited capacity and is not open to observers.

Shamel Pitts Bio
Shamel Pitts (Brooklyn, NY), a 2024 MacArthur Fellow and 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, is a performance artist, choreographer, conceptual artist, dancer, spoken word artist, director, and teacher. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Pitts began his dance training at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and, simultaneously, at The Ailey School. He is a first prize winner in The National Arts Competition from YoungArts. Pitts went on to receive his BFA in dance from The Juilliard School and was awarded the Martha Hill Award for excellence in dance. He began his dance career in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Hell’s Kitchen Dance and BJM_Danse Montreal. Pitts danced with Batsheva Dance Company for seven years under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin and is a certified teacher of Gaga movement language. Pitts has created a triptych of award-winning multidisciplinary performances, with his arts collective TRIBE, known as his “BLACK series,” which has toured extensively to many festivals and performance spaces around the world since 2016. He is an adjunct professor at The Juilliard School, a guest faculty member at Princeton University, New York University, Wesleyan University and has been an artist in residence at Harvard University. He has received a Princess Grace Award in Choreography, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, a Jacob’s Pillow artist-in-residence, and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.