Henning Rübsam

Henning Rübsam
Born	Marburg, Germany
Education	Juilliard School (BFA), Hunter College (MA)
Occupation	choreographer and dancer

Henning Rübsam is a choreographer and dancer based in New York City. He is the artistic director of SENSEDANCE, a resident choreographer for Hartford City Ballet, a lecturer in the Evening Division of The Juilliard School, and a visiting guest professor at Texas Academy of Ballet (Carolyn Bognar, director).

Rübsam was born in Marburg, Germany, where he took his first ballet class at the age of five. He studied with André Doutreval in Kassel and at the Hamburg Opera Ballet School. For several summers he studied at the Internationale Sommerakademie des Tanzes in Köln.

After moving to New York as a teenager, Rübsam's early mentors included Martha Hill and Elizabeth Keen. While a student at the Juilliard School, he took Classical Spanish Dance, studied Indian dance with Indrani Rahman, took a summer intensive at the School of American Ballet, performed as the Faun in the Nijinsky/Debussy ballet, starred in a dance film at the Sundance Institute, where he worked with Diane Coburn-Bruning, Michael Kidd and Stanley Donen, and toured internationally with the Limón Dance Company. He received a B.F.A. degree in dance from Juilliard in 1991.

Upon graduation he founded his own ensemble SENSEDANCE and continued to dance with other choreographers, namely Duncan Macfarland, Murray Louis and most importantly Alwin Nikolais. Rübsam found his next mentor in Beverly Schmidt Blossom, whose work he performed after Nikolais' passing. His interest in early modern dance led to guest appearances with repertory companies in the works of Isadora Duncan, Doris Humphrey and Anna Sokolow. His early work Schubert: Lieder (1991) and his epic solo Sand to Chopin (1993) might owe influences to José Limón, but an independent signature was visible early on, since Rübsam was able to create melodic lines in movement that conversed with the music rather than mirrored it. Rübsam appeared as a guest dancer with a myriad of contemporary choreographers and used his own company as a laboratory for ideas that ranged from setting biblical stories to live accompaniment of a 27-member choir at St. Mark's Church in Carissimi's "Jephte" (and setting an attendance record for the venue) to visceral movement experimentation in an evolutionary safari named "Dolphins and Antelopes" (1996). For the latter as well as future works "Moonpaths" (1998), "Dinner is West" (2005) and "Tenancy" (2011) he commissioned music scores by fellow Juilliard graduate Beata Moon. In addition to Moon, he has collaborated with numerous composers and musicians, including Ricardo Llorca and Leslie Wildman as well as designers of different disciplines, e.g. Fabio Toblini.

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