Stanley Love, an experimental choreographer who built a loyal following for creating dances instilled with joy, vibrant physicality and his wild imagination, died in August 2019. He founded the Stanley Love Performance Group in 1992 after graduating from Juilliard, and created numerous works that embraced spectacle and pop music, dance history and social dancing. Love quickly earned a reputation in the downtown performance scene for using big ensemble casts and embracing an open, unpretentious approach to movement. He viewed dance as a means of creating a collective energy that evoked a sense of ritual, and even the divine. While repetition and unison remained consistent in Love’s dancemaking, he also honored the individuality of his performers’ expressions and gestures, and in part surrendered his works to their personal interpretations. While his adherence to structure gave his work a solid frame, both his philosophy and musical choices — from Prince to Donna Summer to Queen to Nirvana to the Beastie Boys to Destiny’s Child to the Supremes — opened up dance to audiences who might not ordinarily see themselves reflected on a traditional stage. As a catalytic force in the art scene for nearly three decades, Love and his Group impacted so many lives through their ecstatic, insistent, and radical practice of dancing together.
