Black and white photo of Neil Greenberg by Mark Sommerfeld.
Neil Greenberg came to New York from Minnesota in 1976 and danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1979-1986. He is known especially for his “Not-About-AIDS-Dance,” which employs his signature use of projected text as a layering strategy that provides doors into “meanings” in the dance, while also raising questions about the nature of meaning-making.
He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Bessie Awards, repeated fellowships from the NEA and NYFA, a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a NDP Production grant, a Doris Duke Creative Exploration Award, and repeated support from the MAP Fund and NYSCA. He has created two works for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. Greenberg has taught at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, UC Riverside, Purchase College and Sarah Lawrence College. He served as dance curator at The Kitchen from 1995-1999.
His most recent project, Betsy (2022, La Mama) continues his perhaps utopian interest in moving away from representation toward an experience of the performance moment in and of itself. He is currently working on “Next Dance,” which will be performed at The Chocolate Factory Theater November 12-21, 2026.
Neil: “Next Dance is a new 50-minute dance performance work that investigates “next-ness”: of proceeding from the materials at hand to work toward new potentialities; of performing possibility as a negotiation with constraints.
Next Dance also explores “dance-ness” and “performance-ness,” with roots in a movement discovery process by which I utilize source material culled ‘verbatim’ from recorded improvisations by each of the performers.
Next Dance is also my next dance.”
Neil is a 2026 Ruth Maleczech awardee. Learn more about the award.
Choreography: Neil Greenberg. Music: Zeena Parkins and James Lo (working in collaboration). Lighting Design: Michael Stiller. Performed by: Neil Greenberg, Jennifer Lafferty, Owen Prum.
Artist statement: I began making dances in 1979, but I date the inception of my overarching choreographic project to a dance I made in 1987, MacGuffin or How Meanings Get Lost. That’s when I started articulating my obsession with meaning-making, and the experiential kinds of meaningfulness that dance and performance can provide – sensual, perceptual, phenomenological. Even the dances I made in the 1990s, through which I was processing the devastations of AIDS, can be seen through this lens: The “not about” in the title of Not-About-AIDS-Dance is purposeful. Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors has been a guidepost. Also her Against Interpretation.
I draw a connection from “against interpretation” to my experience growing up as a gay child in the 1960s. There I was, a cis-gay-boy-child who loved show tunes, Barbie dolls, and dancing around the living room. None of this was a problem for me. But it was eventually understood – interpreted – as a problem by many around me, like the kids who jeered at me up and down the halls of junior high school. I think this part of my personal history contributes to my desire to make choreography that discourages easy labeling and instead accommodates a complex multitude of resonances. Hence lies my interest, however utopian it may be, in somehow provoking an experience of the performance moment in and of itself – in addition to, and inclusive of, the interpretations and inescapable cultural associations that might be summoned by, or for, the viewer.
Neil Greenberg in “Betsy” (2022) at La Mama
Photo credit: Frank Mullaney
