00:04The two individuals that impacted me the most, the choreographers that I danced for, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.
00:12What they taught me on the stage and off the stage was the importance of being who I was.
00:17What they wanted to see was what Lourdes brought to the stage.
00:21And that forces the artist to really look inside themselves and bring out who they are and what they're about.
00:28I can't remember a time when I didn't want to dance.
00:31I started dancing when I was six years old in Miami. I was born in Havana, Cuba.
00:36And then got a scholarship to come study in New York at the School of American Ballet at the age
00:40of 11.
00:41At the age of 16, I joined the New York City Ballet Company as a full member and danced with
00:47them until I was 39, 24 years.
00:52In 2007, Christopher Wielden asked me the co-found Morphosis.
00:56I am involved in actually every aspect of the dance company.
01:00What sets Morphosis apart is that it is a very unique model.
01:04Because the whole idea of Morphosis is that it's a collaborative production that is being created every year.
01:10So it's not just the vision of one artist, but it's the vision of many artists coming together to create
01:16a dance.
01:17We invite a resident artistic director every year to create a full evening length production for us.
01:25And that artistic director can be a theater director, a film director, a visual artist, a sculptor, a choreographer.
01:32My vision is to be able to bring different artists to dance so that we are breaking the parameters of
01:41the art form,
01:41that we are instilling in it different views, different ideas, different feelings, different colors, different senses,
01:48so that it actually starts to evolve.
01:53Technology is going to play a big role in bringing a younger audience to dance.
01:58And as arts leaders, we have to communicate with them in the manner that they want to be communicated in,
02:04so that these dancers who are on stage that are young and sexy and funny and beautiful,
02:10and they're just so cool, are actually seen by their peers.
02:14As a dancer, you already have the tools in place to succeed at anything that you would hope to do.
02:21If you're happy doing what you're doing, you're going to be successful at it.
02:25So I always ask myself, is this something that I want to do?
02:28Am I in the right place at the right time?
02:31And then once I answer yes to that, I'm okay, because the rest is just hard work.
02:37My name is Lourdes Lopez, and I'm the director of a dance company based in New York called Morphosis.
02:45PhD culture.
02:47name is Lourdes Lopez.
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