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Ruth Zaporah's work has established her as one of this country's pre-eminent solo performers. She is a master of improvisation physical theater, a master of dramatic action. Her scripts are created in a moment-to-moment process, never to be repeated.
Zaporah is both a dancer and an an actor, a performer who can transform her being into characters of great variety. These characters have extra-ordinary, archetypal dimensions, illuminated by her unique use of language, gesture and her freedom of mind. She dances and sounds, creating environments and moods. Zaporah is funny, moving, entertaining. Zaporah is a teacher of these particular skills of performing, which she calls ACTION THEATER. She introduces students to the multitude of characters and variety of minds which reside in their bodies. Simultaneously, she teaches the tools of form and process, so that expressions can be constructed into aesthetic and powerful design. Ruth's trainings appeal to people of all vocation. The goals of her trainings depend on each student's goals and ambitions. Trained actors learn, or re-learn, how to act from their bodies, to act from the present. Dancers learn to fill their motion with feeling and character. For those and others, Ruth's training awakens spontaneity, present awareness, and a sense of play. For her audience and students alike, Zaporah's theater offers a lesson by example: every action becomes exciting the moment we pay it our undivided attention. Ruth has been performing since she was a ballet student at age 4 in Baltimore Maryland. She has never left the studio, first travelling through ballet, then modern dance ala Graham then finally in a desperate attempt to hold a job at Towson State Teachers College in Maryland, she discovered improvisation. There was no turning back. Combined with her devoted interest in Eastern practices of the mind, improvisation proved to be a perfect companion -- a discovery in one informed an insight in the other. Ruth twice received NEA choreography grants as well as numerous other tributes and honors. She takes her work to most of the continents. Recently she was named a Cultural Envoy by the U.S. State Department. Her home is in Santa Fe New, Mexico. |
Ruth Zaporah
