KLEINE: You have these very theoretical concerns in your work, and on the flip side, you practice ecstatic dance twice a week. How are those two in dialogue?
VANDENBROUCKE: When I was little, a teacher said to me, “You think too much to be a dancer.”  read more here.

“Aynsley Vandenbroucke has been exploring the relation of literary formalism to the human body in a way few writers, if any, are doing…. In these uncertain times, one thing we can be  sure of is that a practice as original as hers will have more surprises in store for us on the other side of And’s conjunction.”“  Read the full review here.

“And is autobiography bridging disciplines–visual, verbal, sonic, kinetic ones. And a bibliography; Vandenbroucke’s program notes include a long list of her recent and influential reading. (Spending an hour with a smart cookie who wears her smartness with accessible humanity and ease ain’t half-bad.)”  Read the whole piece here.

“This thoughtful choreographer has long been as interested in words as she is in movement.”
Full listing here.

“As choreographers go, Ms. Vandenbroucke is a poetic one; to her, words are just as important as dance steps.” Listing by Gia Kourlas

“From post-show barbecues to verdant vistas to thoughtful and thought-provoking art, almost everything about this festival is nourishing.  In the past seven years, Aynsley Vandenbroucke and Mathew Pokoik have transformed a few acres in the Catskills into a tranquil offshoot of the New York performance world.”

Their corporeal offerings are, by turn, luscious and stark; each dancer, obscured by fabric, is lost in her own world to create a scene that wavers between intimacy and cool formality…. In the past, Ms. Vandenbroucke has worked with words to create a sensory experience. (In one piece, words were typed in real time as a way to convey ideas dancing on a screen.) In “35 ½” sentences and paragraphs are shown on the wall behind the dancers, but — like the fleeting moments in any dance — disappear quickly so all you grasp is a fragment or two.  More here.

You can’t judge a performance by its promotional photo, but the one for Ms. Vandenbroucke’s new “35 ½” gives us some intriguing hints about what she’s been up to. An index of keywords, superimposed over the image of a rubber boot-wearing dancer, suggests that everything from “radical formalism” to “Swan Lake” to “subtlest dance ever” has been on her mind. It’s worth the trip to Long Island City to see what she and her wonderful collaborators (who include the esteemed dancer-choreographer Vicky Shick) have been cooking up.

 ‘I’m obsessed with the movement of ideas and the choreography of language,’ types Aynsley Vandenbroucke, her words projected on a screen. Those thoughts pervade ‘Untitled,’ a piece in which no one dances, but thoughts about dance and our relationship to art are gently, poetically, presented.
Read the full review of recent Danspace Project Performance here.

A group of New York City-based artists who have worked together in a choreographic laboratory led by Trajal Harrell (the current curator of the Danspace platform, “certain difficulties, certain joy”) present a one-off performance. What it is remains mysterious, but the artists involved are a terrific group, with Will Rawls, Brennan Gerard, Ryan Kelly and Aynsley Vandenbroucke among them.

A Number of Small Black and White Dances is a “tender reimagining of the past, and a sophisticated rumination on how an ephemeral art form can survive while staying true to its fragile, mutable essence.” Read More

“An inquisitive, rigorous process lies behind each of Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s dance works…. She creates meticulously distilled pieces in which she scrupulously avoids falling back on movement that is learned or familiar.” Read More

*In a variation on the idea of repertory (and perhaps an ode to Merce Cunningham’s Events?), Ms. Vandenbroucke is culling from her almost decade of making dances to create a new work, “A Number of Small Black and White Dances.” Here’s to recycling! If her past efforts are any indication, this should be an evening of thoughtful, surprising delicacy.

There is a certain appealing simplicity about Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s “3 Dancers, 4 Chairs, 26 Words,” which opened on Thursday night….For the most part, the women don’t dance in any traditional sense of the word. Ms. Vandenbroucke creates clear, pared-down movement, walking and turning, gestures to the side, a hand to the face, that works well with the allusive, associative piece, lighted with shadowy care (and huge Kara Walker-like shadows) by Nelson R. Downend Jr. ‘3 Dancers ‘ is modest in its aims. But it has an integrity that many grander projects don’t achieve. read more

As curator and choreographer, Vandenbroucke craves formal exploration. After graduating from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, she briefly quit dance, unable to find meaning in questions like, “How high can your leg go?” Eventually, like many before her, she discovered ways of addressing other questions, lately through verbal means—one piece using “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” another teasing stories out of 26 scrambled words. Read more here.

It’s like moving philosophy.

In her new trio “And How Should I Begin?,” the gifted young choreographer struggles with T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The poem is both muttered sotto voce and recited outright, and Vandenbroucke draws upon its teacups, sprawled bodies, magic lanterns, and mermaids riding the waves. Yet the dance, measured out in super-brief vignettes, is strongest when it treats the poem’s melancholy obliquely, using photocopies of the poem to wall off or connect the dancers.

The hazards in a mysterious, quite intriguing excerpt from Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s “Full Circle” are more playful in nature. To live music by Leanne Darling, and in near total darkness, two women in white train flashlights on two others-making them jump-rope over beams, penning them in, spotlighting their squiggling feet before each gets her own lamp and tries in vain to pinpoint everyone else’s fast-moving steps.

Watching Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s “Seven Times Fall Down, Eight Times Get Up” on Thursday night was like attending a service in an unfamiliar house of worship, ritualistic, meditative.