The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Spring Performance Grant to Anna Sperber for her upcoming ensemble dance work.

Anna Sperber is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and performer. Her work has been described by The New York Times as “immediately compelling” and “wonderfully strange” with “moments of theatrical magic.”

Sperber received a 2022 NY Dance and Performance “Bessie” award for Outstanding Choreographer / Creator for Bow Echo. Her work has been commissioned by The Kitchen, Joyce Theater UNLEASHED, The Chocolate Factory, Roulette, Gibney Dance, and Dance Theater Workshop in NYC, as well as by the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC. Sperber has received fellowships and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco Foundation, Marble House Project, The Yard, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance DiP (Dance in Process), Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Movement Research.

Sperber as a co-founder of classclassclass, and co-curator of the 2008 Movement Research Spring Festival. She has taught as a guest artist at American Dance Festival, Movement Research, Freeskewl, Gibney Dance, Hunter College, George Washington University, and Wayne State University. Sperber founded and ran BRAZIL, a studio and intimate performance space in Bushwick, Brooklyn from 2004-2014 and Sunset Space 2019-2020.

Sperber’s new evening length ensemble dance work (currently Untitled) invites the audience to attune to the room, their own bodies and the resonant bodies of the performers. Offering an unordinary feeling of time, the work heightens attention to the rhythms held in our collective bodies and the environment we share. Strength in the work is derived from duration and endurance. With fierce grace, the cast of collaborating dancers express moments of collective solidarity, not often available or accessible in our daily lives. Together we offer the audience an expansive, encompassing atmosphere that holds the collective body.

The premiere will be May 2025 at the Chocolate Factory Theater, (exact dates to be confirmed)

Please visit Anna’s website and Instagram for more information.