Mission

Dance Projects, Inc./Beth Soll & Company: The premise of Dance Projects, Inc./Beth Soll & Company is that choreography and the performing arts at their highest levels should be expressive and thought-provoking, ensuring that the audience members’ minds are challenged even as they are entertained. Ms. Soll’s goal is to choreograph dances that evoke feelings, offer insights, and present the viewer with the familiar seen in a new light. Her work seeks to elicit a wide range of responses from audience members, allowing them to add their own memories and perceptions to the experience of the dance, and to come away with a sense of personal enrichment.

Bio

Beth Soll has been making dances since 1965 and has choreographed more than 125 works. As a soloist and with her company, she has performed in much of the United States and in Europe and Asia.  She received her early training from Romanian modern dancers Iris Barbura and Vergiu Cornea. Later she continued her studies in the European style of dance at the Essenvolkwangschule, the Kreutzbergschule in Switzerland, and the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a degree in modern dance. She has held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin, the Boston Conservatory, Boston University, the Harvard Summer Dance Center, MIT (where she directed the Dance Program for 20 years), UC Santa Barbara, Hofstra University, the New School, Manhattanville College, and many private organizations. She has performed with dance companies in the Midwest and in Boston, and she has collaborated or danced with many independent choreographers, including Frances Alenikoff, Ze'eva Cohen, Bill Evans, Martha Gray, Ina Hahn, Anna Nassif, Rosalind Newman, Wendy Perron, and Mel Wong. For her work, Soll has received 7 Choreography Fellowships and many Dance Company Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, awards from the Artists’ Foundation, and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Arts Lottery, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Polaroid Foundation, the Boston Globe Foundation, the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, and the Lef Foundation. The Company has won awards for outstanding achievement from Boston Magazine, The Boston Herald, The Boston Globe, and the Association of Performing Arts. In 1993, she was given an Eliot Norton Award for her work as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Soll is currently an adjunct professor of dance at Manhattanville College and Empire State College, and she teaches ESL at Columbia University and New York University. Her book, Will Modern Dance Survive? Lessons to be Learned from the Pioneers and Unsung Visionaries of Modern Dance, was published in 2002.