Hadley Smith

Hadley Smith is a New York based choreographer, dancer, zine maker and restaurant worker. Her multi-hyphenate existence encourages her to examine systems of order, hierarchies, and taxonomies in relation to gender and materiality. Hadley’s choreographic practice is strongly influenced by her work in other disciplines; her slide-shows, meditation tapes and the online zine she co-edits, Sublime Materiality. She has presented work in Chicago, Toronto and throughout New York, including venues such as Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Panoply Performance Lab, Dance New Amsterdam (she was a 2012 RAW Materials Artist), and Secret Project Robot. In 2016, she graduated with an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Most recently her current project, 1-140 of 1000 Moves for Back Up Dancers was performed as a part of Draftworks at Danspace Project. 1-250. 1000 Moves for Back Up Dancers premiere at the Brick is indefinitely postponed due to COVID-19.

Hadley Smith Dance began when she talked five friends into making a three hour performance for a storefront space in Crown Heights in 2010. Many aspects of that first project are still apart of her process and values as an artist. Create something that's a lot, maybe too much, maybe bigger or more ambitious than what you think you should ask for. Let your work live in homes and shops and rooftops. Let it live widely in the world. Work with people you know and love. 

1000 Moves for Back Up Dancers is simultaneously a performance, an archive and an invented history. It's a dance that began as a joke, and became a long term project. Because of the deeply social and not distanced nature of this project, it is currently on hold. 

At the moment Hadley is thankful that she can rehearse in studio spaces again, and is working on a solo project that is part lec/dem, part stand-up and all dancing all the time always. Any money donated at this time funds rehearsal space, and collaborators acting as dance dramaturges.