Artistic Director, Choreographer and Founder of CRDANCE
Company and its educational program, Tecniche Di Danza Moderna, CRDANCE
Company founded in 2007. Rago, a native of Italy, joined the Martha Graham
Dance Company in 2009 after completing its Professional Training Program, and
has received commissions from Steffi Nossen Dance Foundation, Accademia
Nazionale di Danza, Alvin Ailey/Fordham and Peridance Capezio Dance Center
where she is currently on the faculty. Rago also teaches at the Joffrey Ballet
School and the Martha Graham School and was named Emerging Choreographer
for MET Dance Company (Houston). Rago restaged Martha Graham’s 1935
work, Panorama for Accademia Nazionale Di Danza at Rome’s Soirees Dans and
Karole Armitage’s American Dream for the Ravello Festival. In addition to her role
as Founder of CRDANCE Company and TDM, Rago is also the company’s Principal
Dancer. Rago’s contribution to the field of modern dance and its history has a
global reach that is diverse and ambitious in its goal to use dance as a language to
make us see.
ARTIST STATEMENT: As an emerging choreographer, Caterina Rago takes
choreography beyond stage-based performance to map new ideas onto the history of
dance. Known for her visceral use of movement, this Italian and American
choreographer founded a dance company in 2007 in New York after completing her
training at the Martha Graham School as a way to work through early ideas relating to
American modern dance and Italian classic traditions in movement. As an Independent
Emerging Choreographer, Caterina Rago is currently working with Executive Director
and Independent Artist Cheryl Kaplan to forge new ways of delivering choreography to
a broader American base. Based on an “El Sistema” approach to dance, Rago’s
choreography sets out to create major works, from Labir Into (2016) to Morso
D’Amore (2022). These works have been developed in a manner and structural thinking
that reference the ground-breaking traditions of important collaborations from Graham
and Noguchi to Balanchine and Stravinsky.
Caterina Rago looks at choreography like musicians or an orchestra might look at a set
of scores that require training and active interpretation. Rago approaches choreography
as an action-based method of problem-solving and collaboration. This physical thinking is
meant to go out into the world not only as entertainment, but as a new way of working