Daniel Lepkoff

The basis of my work is an ongoing practice of attending to our physical experience while moving and investigating the weaving of observation and action that forms our physical dialogue with our constantly changing environment.  The work leads to an appreciation for the movement that spontaneously streams through our body, revealing our, personal aesthetic and imagination, idiosyncrasies, personal history, cultures imprint, and basic survival strategies.  As a performer and dance maker, I seek to tune an audience to their own physical sensitivities , inviting them to carry this awareness out of the theater, into their lives, to taste the beauty in everyday reality

Daniel Lepkoff was introduced to dance in the early 1970’s through the study of Developmental Movement and Anatomical Release Technique with Mary Fulkerson, John Rolland, and the seminal concepts of Mabel Todd and Barbara Clark.
At this time, in a series of informal workshops, Daniel was exposed to the work of many NY artists who were continuing the radical experiments in dance following the Judson Dance Theater including Yvonne Rainer, The Natural History Dancers, Mary Overlie, Barbara Dilly, among others.
Daniel met Steve Paxton in 1970 and together with Steve and others became a central figure in the development of Contact Improvisation. He participated in the first public showing of Contact Improvisation in 1972 and subsequent years was active in exposing this work for the first time to audience and dancers worldwide.
He has collaborated with many other artists and performers including: Paul Langland, Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton; most recently with Eastern European artists Oleg Soulimenko (dancer/Russia) and Attila Dora (musician/Budapest), among others.
He is a founder of Movement Research in NYC and has taught and performed in many festivals and studios worldwide including The American Dance Festival, A Cappella Workshop, and The Trish Brown Studio’s in NYC..
In recent years Daniel has produced a series of articles about own work and the work of others working in a similar vein. These writing have appeared in Contact Quarterly, The Movement Research Performance Journal, and Contredanse Publications in Bruxelles.
This past October, in collaboration with Mira Kovarova, Daniel organized the international dance festival, “Physical Dialogues” in Bratislava, Slovakia. This festival addressed primarily the Eastern European artistic community , and created a frame for a specialize field of dance that views movement as the body’s language of communication with its environment.