Wallstories
Wallstories celebrates the 20 anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, accompanies by the music of both Johann Sebastian Bach and Pink Floyd. As a teenager growing up in Cold-War era Berlin, Yatkin experienced deeply the social, political and emotional divides wrought by this battleground city between East and West – and the profound changes brought on when the wall itself finally fell.
The full production of Wallstories will have its World Premiere at Dance Place on Saturday, October 3, 2009. Visit www.danceplace.org for tickets and more information.
To learn more about the Berlin Wall Project, visit www.berlinwallproject.com. Wallstories is generously supported by the Goethe Institute in NYC, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the University of Notre Dame, the Princess Grace Awards and NY2Dance. Special thanks to Dance Place.
Nejla Yatkin
Nejla Y. Yatkin is a 2008 Princess Grace Choreography Fellow (awarded by the Princess Grace Foundation in New York City) and an Artist in Residence at the University of Notre Dame. In her choreography, she explores the beauty as well as complexity of memory, migration, transformation, identity and multiculturalism through movement. This is achieved by drawing upon diverse traditions of dance, cultures and medium as well as utilizing subjects that are at once universal and timeless.
In 1993, Ms. Yatkin graduated from “Die Etage” a Performing Arts Conservatory in Berlin, Germany. Following this, she danced as a principal with numerous companies in Germany (Fountainhead Tanz Theater, Dance Butter Tokyo and Pyro Space Ballet [1992-1995]) as well as the United States (Cleo Parker Robinson [1996-1999] and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company [1999-2000]). She was critically acclaimed for her performance Stravinsky’s Firebird as “Firebird” with the Denver Symphony under the direction of Marion Alstop and choreographed by Cleo Parker Robinson. During this time, Ms. Yatkin worked with such leading choreographers as Donald McKayle, Eleo Pomare, Anzu Furukawa, Katherine Dunham, and Ron Brown among many others.
In 2000, Ms. Yatkin began choreographing solo works for herself inspired by Martha Graham and other great female choreographers who all started as soloists and later moved to choreograph on companies. To date, she has choreographed on the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, the Washington Ballet, The Maryland Dance Ensemble and the Baltimore Ballet. Her work has toured the world: Austria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Guatemala, El Salvador, England, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Scotland, Serbia, Santo Domingo, Taiwan, Ukraine, the United States and Yugoslavia. Additionally, it has been performed in some excellent venues. For example, as a Guest Choreographer with the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company, her work was commissioned and presented at Lincoln Center Out of Doors (2001) as well as the Joyce Theater (2003). Other venues include Dance Place and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, D.C.), The Place in London, England, Metropolitano in Medellin, Colombia and the Oscar Neumeyer Museum in Curitiba, Brazil among many others.
To date, the response to Ms. Yatkin’s work has been uniformly positive. The opinion of her work is best summarized by Jennifer Dunning (of the New York Times): “(Ms. Yatkin) is a magician, telling tales and creating worlds with understated images and movement. (She) is after more than choreography.” Thus far, Ms. Yatkin has received five Metro D.C. Dance Awards, including “Outstanding Individual Performance” (which was awarded twice), “Best Scenic Design”, “Best Multi-Media Performance” and “Best Overall Production.” In 2005, she was named as one of “Top 25 to watch” by Dance Magazine and was given the award for “Outstanding Emerging Artist” by the D.C. Mayor’s Arts Award Committee. For her choreography, Ms. Yatkin was three times selected to be part of the adjudicated “Maryland Choreographer’s Showcase” (2001, 2003, 2005). For the work created for the Washington Ballet in 2008, she was a finalist for “Best New Work” in the Metro DC Dance Awards.
