Ros Warby
Ros Warby is an Australian/US dance artist, choreographer, and Alexander Technique Teacher. She is recognized for her unique solo performances, invoking characters that often transcend archetypes by sliding between iconic figures & ideas, allowing the body to embrace the complex experience of a human being at any given moment. Warby has collaborated/danced with Deborah Hay Dance Co. since 1998.
Biography
Warby is an award-winning Australian dancer and choreographer. Since 1990, she has presented her solo works at numerous international arts festivals and venues throughout Australia, Europe, and the US, including the Venice Biennale; Melbourne and Adelaide International Arts Festivals; Dance Umbrella / Royal Opera House, London; South Bank Center, London; Sydney Opera House/Spring Dance Festival; Dublin Dance Festival; Tanz Im August, Berlin; DTW, New York; Nottdance Festival, UK; Zurich Festival; Trafo, Budapest; Miami Light Project; and PICA/Portland Institute for Contemporary Art amongst others. Warby has performed in the companies of Russel Dumas’s Dance Exchange, Dance Works, Lucy Guerin Inc., and the Deborah Hay Dance Company, with whom she began her long and fruitful collaboration in 1998. Recognized for her unique performance work in all these contexts, she has been the recipient of the Robert Helpmann Award, Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award, an Australia Council Fellowship, the Age Critics Commendation Award 2006 (Monumental), and numerous Victorian Greenroom awards. Influenced by her studies of the Alexander Technique since 1991, Warby became a certified Alexander Technique teacher in 2001 and currently serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the department World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She continues to develop solo and ensemble work.
Recognized for her unique performance work, the solo dances Warby creates invoke characters that often transcend archetypes by sliding between iconic figures and ideas, allowing the body to suggest the complex experience of a human being at any one moment. The creation of her earlier work benefited from the rapport she nurtured with her creative team, designer Margie Medlin and composer Helen Mountfort, over a 20-year period. With Warby, they created an elaborate interplay between the elements of dance, film, sound and light, and crafted a dialogue between these forms, where they coexist in a manner rarely achieved in multi-disciplinary work.
Her critically acclaimed works SOLOS (2001), SWIFT (2003), and Monumental (2006) toured extensively. Warby and Medlin’s cinematic version of SWIFT (2006) was televised in 2007 on ABC and has been screened at international festivals worldwide. Her most recent solo program toured to Melbourne, Sydney and Perth in November 2014.
Warby has worked with the legendary US choreographer Deborah Hay since 1998. She worked with Hay on the Forsythe Company’s Motion Bank project in Frankfurt 2011/12, and has performed Hay’s As Holy Sites Go/ Duet with Jeanine Durning since 2012. Most recently she has worked on Deborah Hay’s RE-Perspective presented by Tanz Im August in 2019. She performed the iconic solo, FIRE, and Hay’s new work Animals on the Beach.
Born in Sydney in 1967, Warby trained in Europe with Marika Besobrasova (L’Académie de Dance Classique, Princess Grace) Monte Carlo, Central School of Ballet, London, and the Royal Danish Ballet School, The European Dance Development Centre with Eva Karczag, Netherlands, and Lisa Nelson and Dana Reitz, USA. Warby has been mentored by and collaborated with Deborah Hay for the past 25 years.
Warby is a visiting faculty member at Bennington for the 2024-2025 academic year.