, assistant professor of the practice in performing and media arts in the 麻豆视频 and 麻豆视频, was honored in December with a residency at the renowned Yaddo artist鈥檚 retreat.
During her Yaddo residency, Russo developed a dance piece based on long-term research, enriching the work by drawing on ideas of ritual movement, personal memories and family history, and more.
鈥淢y time at Yaddo yielded a synergy between research ideas,鈥 Russo said. 鈥淔or many years I鈥檝e been fascinated by gesture 鈥 small scale movements with large meaning, the specific and recognizable.鈥
Her research during the residency influenced the debut performance of her dance piece 鈥淧relude,鈥 which gives a glimpse of her long-term research, in Brooklyn Dec. 17.
Russo arrived at , whose alumni include 80 Pulitzer Prize winners and more than 30 MacArthur Fellows, planning to steep herself in legacies of gesture, religious iconography and the symbolic postures of religious devotion.
What was unplanned was a serendipitous connection with another resident, a writer, who was also studying gesture. They discussed the work of art and cultural historian Aby Warburg (whose work is ). The conversation inspired Russo to examine Warburg鈥檚 , an attempt to map how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear later in art and culture.
鈥淪everal of Warburg鈥檚 references were the very same materials I had already been engaging in my choreographic process for this project, taped to my studio walls at Yaddo,鈥 Russo said.
She integrated this Warburg research into the work, which she had begun in June 2025 while doing a residency at Kaatsbaan International Dance Center. She further developed the performance piece during marathon sessions with collaborators at Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts in fall 2025, supported by an from the New York State Choreographers Initiative from the New York State Council on the Arts and NYS DanceForce.
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