The producer of The Northfield Experience is Stephan Koplowitz. Since 1984, he has found inspiration for his work from a variety of sources stemming from his interests in music, photography, film, theater and dance combined with his interest in mapping the human experience through all of these arts. As the progeny of an American spy, he had the opportunity to grow up in France, Brazil and see several parts of the world at a young age, which greatly informed his perspective on life and culture.
Koplowitz is a graduate of Wesleyan University, where he majored in music composition and was mentored by composer Alvin Lucier and dance artist Cheryl Cutler. He started his early training with Hanya Holm spending two summers in Colorado and then was awarded Fellowships under Liz Thompson at Jacob’s Pillow from 1980-83, where he started his teaching career and encountered the work of Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Bessie Schonberg, and a host of other influential artists while pursuing his MFA in Choreography at the University of Utah.
As an artist he has lectured, taught and conducted community projects throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Since 1984 he has created 87 works and has been awarded 60 commissions. His concert work has been produced and presented by several venues and festivals, most significantly eight seasons at NY’s Dance Theater Workshop (now NY Live Arts), thanks to then Executive Producer David White who allowed his concert work to develop over several years, the Bates Dance Festival with Director Laura Faure who over seven summers engaged Koplowitz as a creative artist and educator, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with Sam Miller, Dance Place, DC, the American Dance Festival, and others.
His career as a site artist, started thanks to Elise Bernhardt, the founder and director of Dancing in the Streets who commissioned him to create a series of large scale works starting in 1987 with Fenestrations for the windows of Grand Central Terminal, seen as part of Grand Central Dances in New York City by over 16,000 people. Fenestrations, considered a landmark work of site-specific performance, was remounted over the course of four evenings in 1999, seen by over 65,000 people. He returned to work with Dancing in the Streets in 2004 and 2008 (with Aviva Davidson) with both his Grand Step Project (seen by 8,000 in three boroughs of NYC) and his Five Entrances into a War Machine at Ebbets Field.
His site work has taken him to Europe where Val Bourne, Artistic Director of the Dance Umbrella Festival commissioned two seminal works, Genesis Canyon (Natural History Museum) and Babel Index (British Library). Other works have been seen in Germany, Italy, Asia (Hanoi, Vietnam) and across the United States (Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Lewiston, Portland (ME), Los Angeles, Columbus, San Francisco, Milwaukee, St. Peter (MN), Chattanooga, Salt Lake City and San Diego.
Stephan Koplowitz was appointed dean and faculty of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts and served as dean and faculty for ten years (2006-16) capping a thirty-three year career in arts education. He spent twenty-three years as Director of Dance at the Packer Collegiate Institute (private K-12), giving him the experience of teaching every age and level of learning (pre-K through MFA).
His interest in education inspired his contribution to the first book on site-specific choreography Site Dance, published by Florida University Press published in 2009 and 2011 (paperback edition). In addition, his interest in the potential of online creative work lead to the creation of his course, Creating Site-Specific Dance and Performance Works launched in September, 2013. This course has the distinction of being the first dance related course on Coursera and the MOOC platform. The course was relaunched in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Over 20,000 people from 151 countries registered for this course with thousands of people completing the course and initiating new site projects around the world.