“THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF CRISPR”

“The Choreography of CRISPR,” a dance film embodying and illuminating CRISPR gene editing, was commissioned by the MIT Museum for the “Gene Cultures” exhibition in 2022. CRISPR has been compared to “rewriting the book of life” and is often explained in word-processing metaphors. Choreographer Gabrielle Lamb used its choreographic drama instead as the prompt for movement research with her New York City-based company Pigeonwing Dance. The words used to describe CRISPR — twisting, cutting, inserting, copying, repeating, palindromes, clusters — became the vocabulary of an intricate dance of spiraling and folding patterns. Life is movement, and movement is life, whether at the cosmic, the human or the molecular scale. Following the film’s screening, Lamb discusses her creative process, its intersections with the sciences and the importance of improvisation prompts in generating new work. 

Biography
Gabrielle Lamb, choreographer and 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, is based in New York City, where she directs Pigeonwing Dance, described by The New Yorker as “eccentric … playful … curious.” Her work has been presented by American Ballet Theatre, the New York Choreographic Institute, the MIT Museum, BalletX, the Juilliard School, Jacob’s Pillow and Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center. She has won competitions at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Milwaukee Ballet and the Banff Centre, as well as the S&R Foundation's Washington Award and a Princess Grace Award. A native of Savannah, Georgia, she trained at the Boston Ballet School and was a soloist at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, later performing with Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company in NYC. She has been praised by Dance Magazine as “a dancer of stunning clarity who illuminates the smallest details — qualities she brings to the dances she makes, too.” She is a 2024 Hearst Choreographer in Residence at Princeton University.