Annabelle Lopez Ochoa

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa makes sleek and stylish dances that are unabashedly virtuosic. Dancers deepen their technical prowess in pursuit of her aesthetic vision. When performing her works, they seem to lift their legs higher, turn faster, slice more precisely, tilt farther, explode with greater ease, and sail through the air. All with confidence that appears effortless. As a freelance artist, Lopez Ochoa makes work for dance companies of different sizes, scales, and styles, from contemporary ballet to jazz, from companies with long pedigrees to young start-ups. It is unusual for any choreographer to move across the dance spectrum the way she does, and altogether rare for a woman choreographer.

Lopez Ochoa, half-Colombian and half-Belgian, danced with a jazz dance company and Scapino Ballet Rotterdam in the Netherlands before focusing her attention on choreography. The companies that dance her works reflect her diverse background.

In an interview with Laura Kumin for Dance Magazine, Lopez Ochoa stated some of her influences: “the freedom of jazz music, the sharpness of hip hop moves, the visionary dance theater of Pina Bausch, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s eye for detail, video artist Bill Viola for his take on time, the work of fashion designers such as Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Viktor & Rolf—not for their fashion statements but for how they think out of the box each time. I admire them for that, because with each work I also try to expand my limits!”

Ballet Hispanico first performed Lopez Ochoa’s work in 2009 with the world premiere of Locked Up Laura (2009). The duet is a tour de force that explores the identity of a female dancer. As dance writer Tresca Weinstein said, “She’s a woman backstage, a wind-up ballerina onstage.” CloseAlbany Times Union, June 30, 2010

In 2010, two very different companies, Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal and the project-based company called Jacoby & Pronk and Dancers, performed two of her works.

The second work, Zip Zap Zoom (2009), drew on the world of video games as inspiration. The stage space is filled with design elements that suggest a virtual reality game, and Lopez Ochoa challenges the dancers to move with speed and accuracy, as they physically respond to computer commands, first as avatars and then increasingly as individuals.

While Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal had an established pedigree, her work with Jacoby & Pronk began on a much smaller scale. Drew Jacoby had danced with Alonzo King/LINES Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet before moving to New York to become a freelance ballet dancer. Rubinald Pronk danced with the Dutch National Ballet and Complexions Contemporary Ballet Company. They decided to dance together as a duo, commissioning new works and performing established repertory. They make a striking pair, on stage and in photographs.

For the Pillow performances, Lopez Ochoa expanded it into a quartet. The second work was L’Effleuré, a solo made for Pronk. As Szporer noted in his PillowNote, the French title meant, “’the slightly touched one’ or ‘the hyper sensitive one’ recalling at the same time a flower’s powerful beauty and sensitivity.”

In 2015, Lopez Ochoa created a stunning work for American Ballet Theatre principal dancer Daniil Simkin and his collaborating dancers for INTENSIO, a Jacob’s Pillow co-commission. Islands of Memories featured seven dancers, video projections made in real time, and large suspended mirrors for an overall visual and kinesthetic feast. As Siobhan Burke noted in the New York Times, “it’s hard to take your eyes off these dancers.” She went on to say, “Ochoa’s partnering, in which two or three or four bodies smartly leverage one another’s momentum, can be thrilling.”