Vicky Shick

Although I have been in America since age five, the effects of growing up in a displaced household of mostly women remain with me, even now. I'm often surprised that the urge to somehow touch this dislocation continues to preoccupy me.

In my choreography, I want to build a vivid and evocative visual landscape in a delicately skewed and spare world. More than movement invention, my fascination lies in refining a physical language to reveal persona and mood. I'm haunted by small details.

For the past decade, I have had the wonderful privilege of sharing an intimate dialogue with and inhabiting dances in the clothing and set pieces of collaborating visual artist, Barbara Kilpatrick. My work has really been our work.

I cherish the rigor and odd luxury of everyday dance-work. Performing in, teaching, and seeing the dances of others in our community has been a deep pleasure and honor.

Vicky Shick has been involved in the New York City dance community since the late 1970s as a performer, choreographer, and teacher. Shick was a member of the Trisha Brown Company for six years; for the past twenty years she has been showing her own work. Since 1988, she has worked at length with visual artist Barbara Kilpatrick and has performed and collaborated with other choreographers, including Yoshiko Chuma, Deborah Hay, Juliette Mapp, Wendy Perron, Stephen Petronio, Susan Rethorst, Sally Silvers, and Sara Rudner, and more recently with Jon Kinzel, Juliette Mapp, and Jodi Melnick.

Prior to receiving her 2006 Grants to Artists award, Shick presented collaborative pieces with Kilpatrick at Playhouse 91 (1995), The Kitchen (1996, 2000), Performance Space 122 (1997, 2005), Movement Research at Judson Church (2000), The Brooklyn Museum (2002), and Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church (2005).

With funds from her 2006 Grants to Artists award, Shick developed and presented Plum House (A Cartoon) (2007) at Dance Theater Workshop in collaboration with Kilpatrick and Elise Kermani. In 2009, after receiving her 2006 FCA grant, Shick performed Glimpse with Kilpatrick at Trafo Theatre, Budapest and Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. In 2013, the pair performed Everything You See at Danspace Project, and in April 2014, they presented Miniatures in Detail at The West End Theatre.

Subsequent to her 2006 FCA grant, Shick received a 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. More, Shick and Kilpatrick's 2013 piece Everything You See was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie" Award for Outstanding Production.

Before receiving her 2006 Grants to Artists award, Shick was awarded a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie" Award in 1985 with the Trisha Brown Company. Shick and Kilpatrick received a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie" Award in 2003 for Outstanding Creative Achievement for Undoing. In 2004, Shick, along with her collaborators Kilpatrick and Kermani, was supported by the Multi-Arts Production Fund (MAP).

Shick attended Hunter College from 1969 to 1974. She regularly teaches at Hunter College, the Trisha Brown Studio, and Movement Research, where she is a 2015-2016 artist in residence. She also teaches and has created dances at festivals, workshops, and universities in the United States and Europe, including her hometown, Budapest. Shick continues to spread the work of Trisha Brown at colleges and universities in the United States.