Rachel Rugh is a dancer, teacher, mover and shaker currently residing in the hip little hamlet of Blacksburg, VA. She received a BA in dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2008, and moved to the Pacific Northwest a year later. During her four-year tenure in Seattle, she worked with several prominent Seattle dance artists including Pat Graney, Jurg Koch and Amy O’Neal. In 2012, she was one of four emerging choreographers selected to create new work in the Bridge Project space residency at Seattle's Velocity Dance Center. Her choreographic work has also been presented at the Seattle International Dance Festival, Lo-Fi Arts Festival and Evoke Productions' Full Tilt (Seattle, WA). Rachel teaches modern dance technique, composition and improvisation at several institutions throughout the New River Valley. She is currently a guest instructor in contemporary dance at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA and Trillium Performance Collective in Lewisburg, WV. Rachel began collaborating with Eliza Larson as a member of Larson's Greener Grass Dance Project in 2010. Since relocating back to the East Coast in 2013, the two friends have rekindled their collaborative partnership as the performance duo, Mountain Empire.
As a dance artist, Rachel strives to make work that is honest, irreverent and intelligent. She utilizes the bodies of dancers, trained and untrained, to create relatable emotional experiences in a performance setting. Rachel’s pieces often take on a meditative quality: she has found live performance to be the ultimate mindfulness practice-- a shared experience in which the performers, and hopefully the audience, are focused on absolutely nothing else. When our minds are clear and our focus is on the present moment, we radiate joy.
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