National Dance Association

2012 Scholar/ Artist

Josie Metal-Corbin, University of Nebraska-Omaha

Josie Metal-Corbin has been dancing for over 62 years and just completed her 44th year choreographing and teaching dance. She holds the Margaret Killian Professor of Education at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) and is the director of The Moving Company, which in 2001 won an international award in dance in Cesena, Italy. Since 1983, she has been an Artist in the Schools/Community for the Nebraska Arts Council. Her recent honors and awards include: the 2010 Durham Museum Scholar in Residence; a 2007 Carnegie Academy Scholar: a 2005 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council: the National Dance Association's "2004 College/University National Dance Educator of the Year;" a 2002 Fellow in the Center for Great Plains Studies; the 2001 YWCA Woman of Vision Award in Arts and Humanities; the 2000 Nebraska Governor's Excellence in Arts Education Award. She has taught and performed internationally in Great Britain, Jamaica, Portugal, France and Italy.

About Her Works:

Sheldon Connections (October 2007)
Metal-Corbin, J. (Choreographer),Burmeister, J. (Visual Artist/Musician),Sheldon Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE, Photo by David E. Corbin. 

The kinetic language of dance and the multimedia impact of a sound and art installation provided a provocative opportunity for a collaborative experiment and investigation by a visual artist and a modern dance choreographer. The complex relationships of space, time, energy, shapes, contrast, line and design inherent in all three disciplines created the potential to respond to each artistic perspective with an infinite combination of sight, sound, and movement. The dancers' reaction to the art integrated sensory responses with improvisatory and set choreographic design. The audience witnessed the emergence of a dynamic, interactive dialogue of sight, sound, and movement.  They engaged in an endeavor that explored the boundaries between artist, environment and site-specific composition.

 

Ecology (April 28, 2010)
Metal-Corbin, J., (Choreographer), Kessler, N. (Poet), & McAcy, B. (Flutist), Invited to create a new work for Omaha Environmental Week under the auspices of the Omaha Green Coalition, Photo by David Conway.

Premiered at the Glacier Creek Prairie Dedication (May 26, 2010) on the prairie grass as a poem was read and a flute accompanied.

 

 

 

 

 A Modern Spin on the Old Masters: An Evening of Dance (February 22, 2005).
Metal-Corbin (Director), at Joslyn Art Museum in response to Renaissance to Rococo: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Photo by Tim Fitzgerald.

Ode to the Catalogue (February 22, 2006)
Metal-Corbin, J. (Choreographer), Witherspoon Hall, Photo by Tim Fitzgerald.

The Renaissance to Rococo art exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum served as an inspiration for Metal-Corbin's "Ode to the Catalogue." This piece was the dance debut for five UNO physical education majors from Metal-Corbin's pedagogy courses. The five students included the quarterback for the UNO Mavericks, a football coach at Millard South High School, an assistant at Girls and Boys Town and three K-12 physical education majors. This dance was an example of future physical education teachers taking on the challenge of an interdisciplinary project," Metal-Corbin said. "It was an outcome of a fall semester dance class in which the students were learning ways of integrating dance, language arts, reading and sign language into an elementary school curricula. They took a giant leap with this performance at the Joslyn Art Museum that catapulted classroom learning onto the concert stage."