Samantha Shay

Samantha Shay is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, director of theatre and film, and movement artist. As a creative instigator, catalyzer and master collaborator, her acclaimed body of work challenges traditional boundaries, creates new connections, and dances across the fault lines between disciplines. She is currently a Guest Artist & Researcher at Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, where she began as a Fulbright Scholar in 2021. She is also the Artistic Director of Source Material, an interdisciplinary production company and artist collective, which she founded in 2014. Samantha’s theatrical work has been produced at The Grotowski Institute, the Theatre Olympics, RedCat, HERE Arts (New York), Tjarnarbio (Iceland), LungA (Iceland), and the Edinburgh International Fringe. As a filmmaker, she has made ambitious music videos for KÁRYYN, JFDR, Sóley, and Katie Gately, among others. Katie Gately’s Waltz, directed by Shay and starring dancer Bobbi Jene Smith was an international success, recognized by both the music and dance scene, playing numerous film festivals: LA Music Video Awards, Experimental Dance & Music Film Festival, London Music Video Awards, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Portland Dance Film Festival, Thessaloniki Cinedance International, ScreenDance Film Festival, Opine Dance Film Festival, Jacksonville Dance Film Festival, Utah Dance Film Festival, and BAFTA and Academy Award qualifying HollyShorts and CineQuest. In 2016 her original piece, ‘of Light’, gained international attention when it was developed under the mentorship of Marina Abramović , endorsed by Abramović and praised by Björk in The Guardian. Two songs from the original score were released by Mute Records via composer KÁRYYN, with ‘Moving Masses’ named as Best New Track on Pitchfork.From 2017-2019 Samantha’s original piece made in collaboration with The Grotowski Institute and Nini Julia Bang, ‘A Thousand Tongues’ toured Europe and the US, receiving two nominations for Gríman – The Icelandic Theatre Awards – including Most Innovative Performance. In 2019 she made her first dance film, Homesick, in collaboration with Israeli Dancer/Choreographer Danielle Agami (Batsheva Dance Company, Ate9 Dance Company) which is now published exclusively on NOWNESS. In 2020 she directed the digitally-devised Zoom play ‘In These Uncertain Times’, in response to how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the arts. The New York Times described the performance as “like a lyrical essay, poetic, emotive and fluid,” and it has been used as a resource by numerous academic and critical researchers as a pivotal theatrical work during the pandemic. In 2021 Samantha was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to work with the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and she has since been based in Wuppertal, where she is making numerous artistic works with current and former members of the company, and researching the repertory and history of Pina Bausch’s legacy. The first project that emerged from her Fulbirght is Shay’s second dance film, Mother Melancholia, a multi-layered portrait of four women and a eulogy for the planet set to, and inspired by Sóley’s album of the same title, a self-proclaimed soundtrack for the end of the world as we know it. Co-commissioned by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, the dance film approaches patriarchal politics and ecofeminism through an unguarded, unsettlingly beautiful meditation on the difficulty, and immediacy of being fully present in the world. Filmed in the surreal and eroding Icelandic landscape, Mother Melancholia is a quiet, yet urgent conduit between the internal world of the human experience, and the planet we inhabit. The film premiered at the Pina Bausch Zentrum in Wuppertal in May of 2022, wherein her company Source Material partnered with the Tanztheater Wuppertal to offer a digital on demand screening in support of the Ukrainian people. Through the joint efforts of the two companies, revenue from the online stream raised over 5,000 euros for the people of Ukraine. Mother Melancholia went on to win the Audience Choice Award for Best Dance Short at Cinedans, and is currently circulating film festivals worldwide. In 2023, she will release Romance, a new dance film by in response to her research into the works of Pina Bausch in an illuminating meeting point with the short story “It was Romance” by Miranda July. Developed in a close collaboration between Shay and an intergenerational ensemble of dancers from Tanztheater Wuppertal, the creative point of departure for “Romance” centers on the company's first transgender dancer, Naomi Brito, and how her transition was catalyzed by the roles of women as she experienced them in the Bausch repertory. Shot on 16mm film in Pina Bausch's iconic and aging Lichtburg rehearsal studio, “Romance” dances on the fault lines between fiction and reality, dance and documentary, in a fertile intergenerational dialogue between past, present and future, and through a fresh and powerful encounter, assures that the power of an aging legacy is never ending. Romance premieres at Cinedans in March 2023.