Meet the Artist

Aszure Barton, whose choreography has been equated to “watching the physical unfurling of the human psyche” by the US National Endowment for the Arts, started tap dancing at the age of three. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Aszure moved to Toronto at 14 to attend Canada’s National Ballet School. Hungry to push buttons and boundaries, she satiated her propensity for rebellion by gathering friends and creating dances. These processes with her classmates led to the inception of the Stephen Godfrey Choreographic Showcase, which is still ongoing today, and Aszure has been making work ever since. To date, she has collaborated with celebrated dance artists and companies including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Teatro alla Scala, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, English National Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Nederlands Dans Theater, National Ballet of Canada, Martha Graham Dance Company, Bayerisches Staatsballett, Malpaso Dance Company and many others. Her works, described by the New York Times as “offer[ing] an entire world, full of surprise and humor, emotion and pain, expressed through a dance vocabulary that takes ballet technique and dismantles it to near-invisibility,” have been performed on countless international stages, including the Palais Garnier, Mariinsky Theater, The Kennedy Center, The Alicia Alonso Grand Theater, Studio 54, and Lincoln Center. She has also choreographed for film and theater (including the 2006 Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, starring Cyndi Lauper and Alan Cumming and directed by Scott Elliott), and her work has been featured on Sundance’s Iconoclasts TV Series alongside Alice Waters and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Interested in the world outside a system of institutions, Aszure ventured away from a traditional career in ballet after a year of apprenticing with The National Ballet of Canada. With the assistance of the Canada Council, she left her home country to travel through Europe to observe choreographers and dancers in the midst of process, fulfilling her unconventional quest for creative freedom. She then returned home for a part time-apprenticeship with Les Ballets Jazz des Montréal, but after a few years, she decided to move to New York City in order to pursue the making of her own work. There she freelanced with numerous independent choreographers (including Wendy Osserman) who nurtured her wildness and encouraged her sense of humor; she was also introduced to improvisation and the development of authentic movement. She simultaneously worked supplemental jobs until she was able to found her own company, aimed at establishing an autonomous, collaborative platform for process-centered creation. Aszure Barton & Artists made its official premiere at the Montréal Fringe Festival, followed by an inaugural season at New York’s Joyce SoHo, a venue dedicated to showcasing work by exciting emerging artists. Soon after, Barton became the first Artist-in-Residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center under the Martha Duffy Fellowship, and so began her longtime collaboration with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who believes her to be “one of the most innovative choreographers of her generation.” First invited to make a new work at BAC (Over/Come, “disturbing and delicious” - San Francisco Chronicle), followed by a commission for Baryshnikov and Hell’s Kitchen Dance (titled Come In), Aszure found herself dancing and touring with the company while also growing AB&A into an interdisciplinary collective.

As a creator, Aszure seeks to embrace growth and make art that is universal, sensitive, and courageous. With an ever-evolving emphasis on presence and awareness, she aims to cultivate a space where conscious creativity meets regeneration, an inclusive environment where communal, cooperative energy can thrive. Her work explores human behavior and connection in audacious and irreverent ways while simultaneously respecting and dismantling classical and contemporary forms; by layering the mind with tasks and challenges, she strives to uncover the body’s inherent wisdom and its affinity for expression. One of her earliest works for AB&A, Lascilo Perdere, is known for its “tongue duet,” where two dancers perform connected teeth-to- tongue; this “shows us that if two people can accomplish so many complicated maneuvers slowly and tenderly, without ever breaking the intimate, awkward, possibly painful connection, they have ceded much to gain something far greater,” according to The Village Voice. Her Awáa is another exploration of humanity; it focuses on motherhood and other life-giving forces, and has been hailed as “an extraordinary work, full of fantasy and surprises, yet grounded in recognizable behaviors,” by the Washington Post.

It is these themes and practices that have propelled Canadian-American Aszure Barton into the field as a ground-breaking, award-winning choreographer. She is a Bessie Award Honoree and a grateful receiver of the prestigious Arts & Letters Award, joining the likes of Margaret Atwood, Oscar Peterson, and Karen Kain. In 2014, she won the Gross Family Prize for her work Awáa, and this year she received the Ken McCarter Award for Distinguished NBS Alumni. Her work was voted Best Choreography on the 2022 Europe Critic Survey, and she was just awarded with Most Interesting Choreography in Berlin’s Jahrbuch Tanz for two of her works, BAAL and human undoing. She has also been proclaimed an official Ambassador of Contemporary Dance in Canada. As an educator, Aszure is regularly invited to collaborate with and give workshops at private, public and independent art institutions and forums around the globe. She has developed a close working-relationship with The Juilliard School, invited to create over 7 dances since 2003, and she recently served as Artist in Residence at The University of Southern California under the direction of William Forsythe. Her teaching, “like her choreography and her dancing, is fearless. She's a risk taker and a speaker of truths” (Palm Beach Daily News).