Molissa Fenley

Molissa Fenley is an American choreographer, performer and teacher of contemporary dance.

Molissa Fenley (née Avril Molissa Fenley) was born in Las Vegas, Nevada on November 15, 1954. She is the youngest of three children born to Eileen Allison Walker and John Morris Fenley. At the age of six months Fenley and her family moved to Ithaca, NY where her father was a professor of Agricultural Extension at Cornell University. At the age of six, her family moved to Ibadan, Nigeria where her father worked for the US State Department’s USAID program. Fenley attended high school in Spain, and at 16 returned to the US where she received her BA in Dance from Mills College in 1975. Immediately after graduating from Mills, Fenley moved to New York City to begin her career as a choreographer and dancer.

Upon arriving in New York City in 1975, Fenley trained with Merce Cunningham, Viola Farber and studied at the Erick Hawkins School. During her first years in New York Fenley danced for several choreographers including Carol Conway and Andrew deGroat. She began creating her own work and formed Molissa Fenley and Dancers in 1977. After a tour of European festivals in 1980 her work began to receive more critical attention in the United State and abroad. Her early career (1977-1987) was focused on presenting ensemble work. Fenley and her dancers displayed remarkable stamina through complex patterning and sustained passages of intense speed, exemplified in works such as Energizer (1980). In addition to more traditional dance classes, Fenley and her dancers did workouts that included running, calisthenics and weight training in order to achieve the strength and endurance needed to execute her physically demanding choreography. Fenley has maintained this aesthetic of athletic virtuosity throughout her career.

In 1987 she disbanded her ensemble and made a shift to performing solo works, often in collaboration with visual artists including Kiki Smith, Richard Long and Tatsuo Miyajima and composers such as Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros. It was during this period that she created her seminal work, State of Darkness (1988), which was commissioned by the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. Set to Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, this 35 minute solo received critical acclaim for both its physical rigor, innovative use of Stravinsky’s score and intense sense of ritual drama. Fenley reconstructed State of Darkness in 1999 at the request of New York City Ballet principal dancer Peter Boal, and again in 2007 for Pacific Northwest Ballet. ‘’State of Darkness’’ received a Bessie Award for both Fenley’s original performance in 1989 and for Boal’s reconstruction in 1999.

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