Photo: Marion Chuniaud & RubenNaranjo
Mindel Grossbard
Biography
Mindel Grossbard is a dancer, improviser, and musician who is fascinated by the music that
moves through her body. She uses piano, guitar, and movement as both means and medium to weave stories and to connect to what is deeply human.
Contact improvisation is her greatest teacher – a tool to access joy and a way to learn about life. She enjoys playing with gravity and other moving bodies to explore the phenomena of falling upwards. Her movement is informed by the principles of the Axis Syllabus and a two-year residency at Earthdance in Massachusetts.
Mindel grew up in an isolated, strict Hasidic village, where the culture and traditions were rich but sometimes came at the cost of her freedom. At twenty, she left the community and began her dance journey. Since then, the echoes of her past continue to reverberate in her artistic work.
Artistic intent
I create because I have to. It is a matter of life and death. I sing, dance, and create music to discover who I am.
There is, and always has been, an unexplainable impulse in me to move and make music. For me, they are the same thing: a drive for survival. I constantly ask myself what this impulse is and where it comes from.
I dance because when I dance, I feel alive.
I dance because I feel lost – lost between the worlds I have known and the world I live in now. I turned my back on religion, tradition and culture. I betrayed myself to find creative freedom. I try to reject anything that reminds me of my past, yet it turns up wherever I look and in all that I create. I dance the grief, the unforgiveness, the unforgiven. I dance to integrate the richness and beauty of the old with the possibilities of the new.
I dance because it brings me joy, I dance because I have more questions than answers.
Can I move to what moves me?
