Originally from the Midwest, Ellie Goudie-Averill is a dance artist and educator who works with dancers of all ages on technique and performance. Since graduating with her MFA in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa, she has served as a professor at Temple University, Bucknell University, the University of Kansas, Franklin & Marshall, and Connecticut College. She has danced professionally for Sara Shelton Mann, Susan Rethorst, Lucinda Childs, Bronwen MacArthur, Group Motion, and more.  Ellie is a regular collaborator and dancer with Tori Lawrence + Co. in dance films and site-specific works and has been with the company for ten years.  She currently teaches at Amherst, Smith, and Keene State Colleges, and at the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought/Hawley Street Ballet in Northampton, MA.  She is also the co-founder of Atland Residency, a home for site-specific and land-based art in the Berkshire foothills.  Ellie's dance reviews and other writings have appeared online at thINKingDANCE and BAC Stories, and she is the editor for Sara Shelton Mann's forthcoming Moving Alchemy Training Manual.

 

Artist philosophy in brief:  

I am a dance artist, educator, writer, and choreographer.  I am invested in dance as an art form that creates deep and lasting knowledge in the body through participation, practice, and conscious choice-making. As a teacher, I reframe codified movement practices by providing students with anatomical information, imagery, and carefully crafted combinations.  I work to help students find new entry points into repeated movement, increase technical skill and performance quality, and to remain open to new teaching methods and ideas about what dance can be and do in the world. 

 

I am a working dancer, actively free-lancing, training, and performing in a variety of settings.  I teach from a place of body positivity and acceptance, and with a great respect for the individual.  As a queer woman, I grapple with the fraught cultural implications of some of the western traditions that I teach, and actively delve into the complex histories of these forms, inviting conversations about why and how we continue to bring these practices forward, and how they can best serve us in the climate in which we currently live, dance, and perform.