Although dancer and choreographer Jeremy Nedd’s heart belonged to classical ballet when he entered the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, the guidance and encouragement of his instructors opened up a whole new world for him.
“I didn’t have as much motivation or, I guess, passion, and they really helped rekindle that. I guess it was just having someone feel the confidence that you could go further in life with something that you enjoy. They really pushed us,” he recalled.
Nedd eventually grew to love modern dance, especially the Graham Technique, during high school and continued pursuing those forms of dance.
Nedd’s choreographic work, “from rock to rock … aka how magnolia was taken for granite,” will make its New York premiere June 18 and 19 as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City series. The Brooklyn-born and -raised Nedd describes himself as “a mover and a maker” who tends to be “on the quieter side.”
Nedd also attributes his admission to the highly competitive program at LaGuardia and the rigorous instruction he received at Ballet Tech, where he had trained since the age of 9. “It was truly a formidable feat to get into the school,” he recalled.
For the past nine years, the native New Yorker has been based in Basel, Switzerland, relocating there after working in Dresden, Germany, for a few years. “I had a dear friend who was working in Basel, and I was looking for someplace else to dance and experience other choreographers’ work within Europe,” he said. “It was really just a desire to see new choreographic styles and continue to learn.”
After working professionally for a number of years and completing his master’s degree, Nedd turned to choreography. “It was a natural progression,” he recalls. “You’re working in theaters with various other choreographers, and then you start to have your own ideas.”
The theater where Nedd worked hosted a young choreographers’ showcase. “You can kind of try your ideas in a short-form work, and I tried a couple of things and got some nice feedback. I started to go deeper into the ideas bumping around in my head and started to take it more seriously.”
With that encouragement, he began exploring other ideas, including creating a work based on the “Milly Rock” dance. The dance involves swinging the arms back and forth in a loose rhythmic motion while rocking the shoulders and upper body from side to side, and it was popularized through social media.
A lot of what Nedd brings to his work is very personal. “from rock to rock … aka how magnolia was taken for granite,” Nedd explained, “came about the way most of my projects come about: just in conversation with close, longtime collaborators and friends.”
Milly Rocking was popular among Nedd’s dance peers and often came up in conversation. At one point, he recalls saying, half in jest, “One day, I’m gonna make a piece where we’re just Milly Rocking for [about] an hour.”
He began thinking, “What would that really even look like? What kind of framework do you have to create for that to be an interesting evening of dance?” His ideas led to funding, and the piece made its debut in September 2023.
Nedd wanted to use the dance to explore ideas of community and virality, which have, in certain ways, redefined the concept of community in the 21st century. For Nedd, the Milly Rock, which was created in Brooklyn’s Black community, is an important symbol of how the relatively new virtual world continues to affect culture. His work aims to provoke thought about how these elements intersect and shape culture. “Milly Rock is part of a whole list of viral dances that are kind of prevalent. I don’t want to say everywhere, but I guess if you’re in dance circles and you have a mobile phone, kind of everywhere.”
Although the Milly Rock is the focus of the piece, virality is the larger point, and the work includes other viral dances as well. “It is still coming from really specific places, communities, and cultures, but then what happens when it just becomes viral and a lot of people have a certain connection or attachment to it?”
Nedd’s dancers, like him, live internationally but are all from the United States, where the Milly Rock originated, further shaping the meaning of the work. The community of dancers is extremely important to Nedd. “I like working in social spaces,” he said. “I’m very committed to my collaborators and trying to create community through the work that we do.”
His personal passions also inform his work. He loves reading in his downtime and, at the time of this interview, was engrossed in Kazuhiro Soda’s “Why I Make Documentaries: On Observational Filmmaking.” “It’s interesting to think about how other people think about what they make and about how those methods can be applied to what I do,” he said.
Dance, Nedd believes, is also a powerful vehicle for discovery if the appropriate level of respect, rigor, and curiosity is applied. “There’s all sorts of street dance traditions, hip-hop traditions that are completely virtuosic, but they come from really humble places,” he said. “For me [or] anyone who’s engaging with dance, you have to find that spot where there is joy and you can find depth. The piece itself is a good example of where rigor can present itself and what the products of a certain kind of rigor can reveal.”
For more details, visit Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City series or lincolncenter.org.
