Aszure Barton is a Canadian choreographer.
Aszure Barton was born and raised in Alberta, Canada. She received her formal training at the National Ballet School in Toronto, where, as a student, she helped originate the ongoing Stephen Godfrey Choreographic Showcase. To date, she has collaborated with and created works for Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ekaterina Shipulina/Bolshoi Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada, Houston Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, The Martha Graham Dance Company, Nederlands Dans Theater, Sydney Dance Company, Ballet British Columbia, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Juilliard School, and Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal (Resident Choreographer 2005-08), among many others.
Other work includes choreography for the Broadway revival production of The Threepenny Opera directed by Scott Elliott (translation by Wallace Shawn and starring Alan Cumming, Jim Dale, Nellie Mackay, Ana Gasteyer, and Cyndi Lauper), numerous film and installation projects, and international outreach activities such as Kenya’s Earth Project: Healing the Rift, at the Laikipia Nature Conservancy. Aszure’s choreography has been featured in numerous film and television projects, including the Sundance Channel’s Iconoclasts Series with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alice Waters.
She is the founder and director of Aszure Barton & Artists, an international dance project, and her works continue to tour to Europe, Asia, and Africa as well as Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. She has been an artist in residence at The Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City and The Banff Centre in Canada. She was proclaimed the official Ambassador of Contemporary Choreography in Edmonton, Alberta, and she has received numerous awards including, most recently, the Banff Centre’s 2012 Koerner Award for Choreography and Canada’s prestigious Arts & Letters Award.
In its review of a 2011 performance, The Buffalo News says that Barton and her company "let flow wave after wave of idiosyncratic movement that vacillated from elegantly graceful to stylized clowning and the outright bizarre."