Annie Sailer is a New York dancer/choreographer and painter. She has directed Annie Sailer Dance Company since 1983 and ASDC (New York) since 2001. Sailer has been choreographing, performing, teaching, and painting since the mid-seventies. Her choreography, for which she has received grants and fellowships, has been performed throughout the United States. Due to her husband’s academic career, she has relocated several times throughout the U.S., each time building a dance company, receiving funding, and creating a performing presence.

 Annie Sailer began her dance training as a child in Washington, D. C. at the Washington School of Ballet and later with modern dancer Erika Thimey. Her primary dance training has been in the Erick Hawkins Technique. Following college in 1974, where she was introduced to the Hawkins technique by visiting artist Dick Jones at Washington University in St. Louis, MO., Sailer attended the American Dance Festival and began her training with Nancy Meehan. Relocating to New York City after the summer, she continued her intensive study of dance with Nancy Meehan, members of the Meehan Company, and with members of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. Sailer performed with Nancy Meehan Dance Company in 1984 and 1985. Since 1998 Sailer has also been working extensively in improvisation.

 Sailer has been teaching modern dance based in the Hawkins Technique since 1978. She has taught and choreographed at George Washington University, Kenyon College, The American Dance Festival, University of Wyoming, LaGuardia Community College, as well in public schools, and dance studios, including Annie Sailer Dance Studio in New Haven, CT and in Mount Vernon, OH. Her students have included professional dancers, non-dancers, college students, children, teens, psychiatric patients, and adults with Downs Syndrome.

 Sailer holds a Bachelor of Fine Art Degree from Webster College (1974), a Master’s Degree in Dance from George Washington University (1982), and a Master’s Degree in Studio Art from New York University (2007).

 Annie Sailer Dance Company (New York) was established in 2001. Sailer’s choreography encompasses large, complex, group dances as well as structured improvisations. The intent of her work is to create dances that evoke the unconscious.

 Sailer’s choreography is influenced by her life experience, Japanese aesthetics, the natural world, visual art, literature, and the choreography of Nancy Meehan. On the one hand, her work has an understated quality that implies emotional and psychological states of mind; on the other, an ‘over-the top’, slightly absurd, irreverent sensibility, while simultaneously evoking dream-like narratives. There is a direct physicality, simplicity, and sense of weight to Sailer’s movement; while structurally, her work is about space, giving it the feel of a moving sculpture that is informed by her paintings.  Her dances shift in and out of formal and informal structures in which the movement is framed and frontal one moment, and bleeds off the edges of the performing space in the next. Technical dance sequences overlap with the pedestrian, freeze in stillness, and are repeated or referred to in various groupings, facings, and locations. Images are layered, sometimes creating washes of abstract movement and sometimes suggesting dramatic episodes that have an archetypal association. At another point, a version of the same image may then appear, simplified and stripped down, suggesting a whole new feeling altogether.

 In both her dance and visual work Sailer builds  ‘languages’ and deconstructs them so that the forms accumulate, turn inside out, disappear, and rematerialize in a different context. Costuming and occasional sculptural installations (created by Sailer) work as integral parts of the piece, color playing a significant role in defining the emotional tone of each dance. Sometimes the installations generate content in and of themselves, and sometimes, simply provide an additional visual element to the choreography. These designs, colors, and forms refer to her paintings.

 Annie Sailer Dance Company members include  Laura Easley, Susan Golub,  Heather Meagher, Tyler Tedmon-Jones, Rod Rufo, and Annie Sailer.

DVDs and videos upon request.

 Sailer lives in Williamsburg,  Brooklyn, NY. She teaches as an adjunct in the Fine Arts Program at LaGuardia Community College, L.I.C., New York, directs Annie Sailer Dance Company, and paints in her Greenpoint, Brooklyn studio.