Sally Rousse
Sally Rousse performs, teaches, choreographs, curates, writes and advocates dance. She is a two-time recipient of the McKnight Fellowship for Dancers and a Sage Awardee for Best Performer; she was named Artist of the Year by Minneapolis City Pages; and is the mother of two young adults.
Rousse’s site-specific works have taken dance off the traditional stage and into venues such as the Kwon Tung Pier in Hong Kong and up the tree of a vacant lot and have also been seen in both theatrical and commercial venues such as the Guthrie, Southern and State Theaters and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; MASS MoCA, North Adamas, Massachusetts; Cartoon Channel; and Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Often described as otherworldly and drawing on various practices (contact/improv, aerial, humor, subversion) her work features artists who identify as LGBTQIA+, multi-generational, disabled+ and/or BIPOC. Born in Vermont, Rousse performed as a leading dancer with Ballet Chicago; Royal Ballet of Flanders, Antwerp, Belgium; and James Sewell Ballet, the company she co-founded in New York City. She has danced many roles in the classical and Balanchine repertoires, works by Maurice Béjart, Jiri Kylián, and more than 100 new works created on her by contemporary choreographers, branding her “Renegade Ballerina.”
As an instructor of classical and contemporary ballet and Zena Rommet Floor-Barre, Rousse seeks to replace exclusive physical standards with unbiased and somatically sound ones. She formed Dance Advocacy Minnesota (DAMN) in 2017 to address sexual misconduct and inequity in the dance industry and has contributed labor to two national organizations, Creating New Futures and BreakBank, which are focused, respectively, on ethics and equity in dance and promoting balanced screen usage, while decentering whiteness.