Nita Little was voted by the members and visitors of Universe Spirit as our Dance Artist for the Fall quarter 2006.
Nita Little has been developing, choreographing, performing and teaching improvisational dance for the past thirty years, notably Contact Improvisation, which she helped evolve from its inception with Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and others. She collaborated in numerous performing companies introducing Contact Improvisation throughout the United States. She is a master teacher with former students all over the world who are themselves master dancers and teachers. Through CI she discovered her abiding interest in the evolution of consciousness and the mind/body relationship.
Since 1981 she has been developing an evolving curriculum called The Mind in Motion, which explores the range of experiential states along the mind-body continuum and reveals principles that define Contact Improvisation as well as other movement forms. This work is deepened by her investigation of the mind through work such as hypnotherapy and NeuroLinguistic Programming. As a performing artist her current work is a mix of both formal and improvisational choreography and scores. It frequently explores character, story, and concept.
Nita received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in choreography and was on the California Arts Council Touring Program. The latter award was to her solo dance company, NITA LITTLE DANCE THEATRE, which she began in 1984, continued through 1990, and reinstated in 2000. In 2002 Nita created Playing God, an hour-long dance opera that received funding through the Dance USA National College Choreography Initiative.
Over the years Nita has been both faculty and guest artist at numerous colleges and universities including New York University, California Institute for the Arts, Texas Christian University, Temple University, Tufts University, Scripps College and UC Santa Barbara.
Nita teaches and performs yearly at national and international dance festivals including ImPulsTanz, Vienna, The Side Step Festival, Helsinki, the Internationales Contact Festival Freiburg, Germany, the Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation and the West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival, Berkeley California. She also teaches locally and nationally throughout the year. Nita lives with her son in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. As she has pioneered a path in the understanding of the mind/body/spirit relationship, Nita's mission, conscious evolution, has been the backbone of her passion and her practice. Her goal is to see, feel and reveal grace in all its forms and as it exists in the actions of the mind and the body.
Visit Nita's website www.nitalittle.com for more information.