Photograph by Shoccara Marcus
The camera zooms in close as Sue Schroeder strides forward, her sunlit face a canvas of lines that shift as she smiles. In another frame, she grasps a cinder block tower amid the lengthening shadows of Sol LeWitt’s 54 Columns. Then she’s leaning into the white grid of the High Museum of Art’s exterior walls or hanging over a tree limb near the Chattahoochee River, staring into space.
Her voice emerges over the frame, reading a line from Brazilian author Clarice Lispector: “I want to feel it in my hands—the quivering and lively nerve of the now.”
Schroeder created the solo work for the short film I am a word and also its echo, which was screened nightly on the storefront windows of Core Dance’s Decatur Square studios. It’s one of a plethora of projects Schroeder has created since reshaping her dance company four years ago. Through collaborations at home and abroad, Schroeder, 67, has discovered new ways to amplify her artistic voice and bring Atlanta more deeply into the conversation around experimental, movement-based art.
Photograph by Nuno Veiga
Her growth was evident last October in Braiding Time, Memory and Water, her site-specific performance on a verdant stretch of Powers Island along the banks of the Chattahoochee River. The collaboration with conceptual artist Jonathon Keats and composer Felipe Pérez Santiago was produced by Flux Projects in partnership with Core Dance.
Anne Archer Dennington, executive director of Flux Projects, said she was struck by the piece’s depth and intensity, which she attributes to Schroeder’s ability to convene artists of different disciplines through a shared sense of trust and adventurous creativity.
Just as rivers adapt to changing landscapes, Core Dance has reinvented itself several times since its 1980 founding. Over the decades, it has survived despite the fleeting nature of many dance companies and has become one of Atlanta’s beacons of creativity. Schroeder and numerous guest artists have developed a wide-ranging body of work that leans toward social and environmental activism.
Photograph by Scott Lowden
Much has changed for Schroeder over the years, but curiosity is a constant. “It’s a push for discovery, or the push to know or the push to understand,” she says. “Art can answer a lot of questions that we can’t sort out any other way.”
Schroeder loves blurring boundaries between arts disciplines, and she’s passionate about collaboration. This kind of process requires dancers to dig deep into personal experience—then to work through the pulls and sways of shared impulses to arrive at fundamental truths that help shape the creative process.
Traditionally, choreographers bring in prepared steps for dancers to replicate, rather than collaborating on ideas for a work. “Somehow we’ve taken that out of people’s ability to believe in themselves, that they can create and they have something of value to put in the room,” says Schroeder. “I’ve done a fair amount of unlearning of people over the years.”
Alejandro Abarca, a dance professor at Emory University’s Oxford College, was a company member from 2009 to 2012. He is one of scores of dance artists Schroeder has nurtured. Abarca says that Schroeder’s approach makes each artist an “active stakeholder” in a project.
“I learned that my most valuable asset as a dancer is my brain and the fullness of my being,” Abarca says of his time with Core Dance. “My potential gets magnified if I allow myself to be fully present and step outside my own definitions of who I think I am as an artist.”
Photograph by Paige McFall
Photograph by Paige McFall
Over the past decade, Schroeder has used those principles to produce such powerful works as Life Interrupted, about the incarceration of Japanese American citizens during World War II, and the exuberantly edgy American Playground, created by Israeli guest artists Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor with the dancers’ help.
The pandemic changed everything, making in-person rehearsals and touring much more complicated. Also, Schroeder was working often in Europe. That led her to a moment of clarity: She didn’t need a full-time dance company to be successful. She could hire dancers as needed on a project-by-project basis. Fundraising to support dancers’ salaries and benefits had also grown more difficult. “It was keeping me from some artistic endeavors I could enter, if I didn’t have that,” she says.
Schroeder joined the National Water Dance and has since created site-specific works on the Georgia coast and in Hawaii, Iceland, and Germany. In 2022, Schroeder helped spearhead a project to renovate a Polish manor house into an artists’ gathering place—a move that connected her with like-minded artists of varying disciplines from across Europe.
The Decatur studio space remains active, with daily dance classes and frequent improv jams. The artist residency program Lift is one of several initiatives that continue Core Dance’s role as a center and laboratory for creating and presenting movement-based art.
Meanwhile, several of Schroeder’s new collaborations have come to fruition. Standouts include the film HOME, created with filmmaker Adam Larsen and composer Christian Meyer. The deeply powerful meditation on home, the body, and nature is slated for a screening with a live performance at the 2025 Florence Biennale.
Schroeder is also curating a live art exhibition at De Montfort University’s Leicester Gallery in the United Kingdom and working to take Braiding Time to Vienna and Mexico City.
Braiding Time’s next iteration will run April 26 and 27 at Tanyard Creek Park in Atlanta.
On April 23, Schroeder will be honored alongside Jane Woodruff Blount at Synchronicity Theatre’s Women in the Arts and Business Luncheon. Meanwhile, dance films screened on Core’s Decatur Square storefront are ongoing. The 11th enCore: Dance on Film festival is scheduled to open May 2 and run through August 31 from dusk to midnight.
Creating I am a word and also its echo has led Schroeder to reflect on her “third chapter” of life and the new friendships and creations that has marked it. There’s a certain amount of not caring what others think and, instead, focusing on the work that she has planned. Says Schroeder, “I feel the urgency of each and every moment.”
This article appears in our April 2025 issue.
