“You don’t know what these zanies might do.”
- The New York Times
From Deepe Darknesse, 2024, photo by Maria Baranova
from This Could Be You, 2025. Photo by Maria Baranova.
“These performers are fully committed comics, unafraid to make donkeys of themselves”
- Brian Seibert, The New York Times
“I wholeheartedly loved “Deepe Darknesse,” Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein’s muscular dance-theatre hybrid in the Live Artery festival.”
- Helen Shaw, The New Yorker, “Public Obscenities” Triumphs Off Broadway”
From Catches No Flies, 2020. Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk
{ PRESS SELECTIONS }
{ PRESS SELECTIONS }
“How to describe an Engelstein and Fagan performance?”
“What subversive choreographer Lisa Fagan is selling, we’re buying. ”
“CHILD’s show, 1-800-3592-113592, is the most blissed out, beautifully constructed weirdness I’ve seen in ages; skibidi vibes meets Jersey mall culture meets Maggie Rogers-esque rock gorgeosity. Only 1 more weekend…a pure contact with the Stranger God”
“The High Weird...the performers’ muscularity and skewed humor kept the absurdity twanging, kind of dangerously. The show could have just felt like “ah, this is fun & nuts,” but instead I was scared for my life.”
“Lisa Fagan is the most interesting movement maker in town.”
““...threads post modern cool with cabaret-like showiness.””
“Exponential also programmed choreographer Lisa Fagan’s Red Carrots, a dance-theatre piece that was the most completely delightful thing I saw in the festivals. It was dada lite, with dancers crawling around whispering things we couldn’t quite hear, throwing vegetables around, and doing monologues that were mostly suspicious commentaries on how everyone else around them was doing. It was a chopped-up four-woman portrait of a very familiar feeling: Does everyone else know what’s going on?
Appropriately, it was the last festival show I saw. Because does everyone else know what’s going on? Maybe I’ll figure it out next year.”
The making of HILMA, world premiere at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, PA, produced in partnership with New Georges
ABOUT
〰️
ABOUT 〰️
Lisa Fagan is a choreographer, dancer, and director based in NYC whose work has been dubbed “The High Weird” by critics. She is currently the director/choreographer and a practicing member of the experimental performance collective CHILD, a company of 14 multidisciplinary artists. RECENT: No President by Nature Theater of Oklahoma (dancer), at The Skirball Center NYC, Dec 2024, HILMA (choreographer), at Tony-award-winning theater The Wilma (June 2024), Open Throat (choreographer) at Little Island NYC, based on the novel by Henry Hoke, July 2024, Deepe Darknesse (creator/performer) in New York Live Arts’ Live Artery 2024. Fagan’s work has been presented in NYC by: Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC Open Artist in Residence, Fall 2023), Prelude Festival, Immediate Medium, Mercury Store, Radiohole, LifeWorld, Target Margin (2019/20 Artist in Residence with composer Catherine Brookman), HERE Arts Center, Bard College (Choreographer: Promenade, Dir. Morgan Green), The Exponential Festival (2019/20 Exponential Fellow), Mabou Mines (Resident Artist Program), Ars Nova (ANT FEST), New York Live Arts (2017/18 Fresh Tracks Artist), Movement Research, Gibney, Roulette, The 92nd Street Y, and others. She collaborates with many artists across disciplines supporting their shows choreographically and as movement director. On-screen choreography credits include the TV pilot THESE DAYS, premiering at Sundance 2021, and various music videos. She’s taught choreography, dance and physical performance practice at Barnard College, The Celebration Barn, and Gibney.
Photo by Maria Baranova
From Red Carrots, 2019. Photo by Ty Lyons Graynor
From Warm Line, 2019, with creator Hannah Mitchell. Photo by Ty Lyons Graynor
From Pencil, 2017. Photo by Yi-Chun Wu