Brenna Mosser is a Contemporary Dancer and Choreographer based in Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Her vision is to illuminate the awe in her surroundings by dynamically sculpting falls, stumbles, and asymmetries. She spent two years in the Conservation Corps of Minnesota and Iowa, where she faced the reality of climate change and has since dedicated her artistry to dissect and digest this crisis.
She earned her bachelor’s in dance performance at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, UK. Here, she was exposed to Choreutics, Butoh, and Set Design; these are key disciplines in her artistic development. She supplemented her degree at le Centre national de la danse Contemporaine in Angers, France where she spent two years learning intensively from world-renowned dance companies and their artists. There, she earned an L3 licence in dance performance and in arts management.
Mosser’s artistic practice uses her body as her launchpad between our many realities and her experiences – her interior world is where she wrestles with the facts of our past, the realities of our present, and the visions of our future. She calls her practice introspective improvisation and it is how she generates the movement that builds her choreographic works. This practice is influenced by Mosser’s training in Butoh - a modern Japanese performance form that was developed after World War II and is most famously characterized as slow and grotesque. She draws on a branch that embodies images, atmospheres, spirits, and sentiments. This intimate technique is augmented by her studies in Choreutics - the study of movement dynamics based on Rudolf Laban’s research - which gives her tools to define the space and alter the movement qualities of her phrase work to fit the intentions behind them.
Her choreographic process is collaborative and full of conversations. She seeks out artists and environmental scientists to work with who value this because she relies on the multitude of perspectives to nourish the ephemeral and intimate work of the live performances she creates. These collaborators are diverse in race, gender, sexual orientation, education level and religion. From these conversations, she generates imagery and develops types of presences that underlie the movement integral to her choreographic works.
Mosser views these conversations as qualitative cross pollinations of knowledge pools. It is a fundamental step to developing meaningful choreographic works that her audiences feel connected to. Because of this, she founded her company, Analog Dance Works (ADW) in 2019. ADW’s mission is to explore the intersections of dance and science through choreographic works and roundtable discussions. This structure allows her to explore imagery and presences that are inspired by environmental science, physics, and natural history through her choreographies. Because of my time in the Conservation Corps, all shows ADW produces revolve around aspects of Climate Change. ADW has successfully produced two shows - Serve Id (2022) memorializing our 4 seasons in Minnesota via the iconic whitetail deer, and The Awe Factor (2024) depicting a horror dream landscape on a plastic island.
