Elizabeth June Bergman
Legend of Dance
Why They Matter
Bergman's work models an integrated approach to dance that refuses separation between scholarship and making, between popular and concert forms, and between movement study and cultural analysis. For dancers and students now, her practice demonstrates how screendance, improvisation, and social-dance…
Known For
Biography
Elizabeth June Bergman is a dancer, scholar, educator, and choreographer whose practice bridges stage performance, improvisation, and screendance. Her work investigates popular and commercial dance forms through a research-led approach, examining how social-dance vocabularies carry politics and history. At Muhlenberg College, where she is an Assistant Professor of Dance, Bergman teaches movement forms, dance studies, and media-centered courses that explore the intersections of popular culture with race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability. Her choreographic work moves fluidly between social-dance history and staged composition. In *Dance Punk!*, created for Muhlenberg's performance program, Bergman investigated punk and disco as distinct but interconnected social cultures, developing vignettes around club and music-venue environments rather than treating either form as isolated step vocabulary. This approach reflects her broader commitment to understanding dance not as abstraction but as embedded in lived culture and community practice. Bergman is a co-artistic director of Muhlenberg College's 2026 *In Motion* concert.
Legacy & Impact
Bergman's work models an integrated approach to dance that refuses separation between scholarship and making, between popular and concert forms, and between movement study and cultural analysis. For dancers and students now, her practice demonstrates how screendance, improvisation, and social-dance research can be woven into a coherent artistic voice—and how teaching itself becomes creative work when it centers the politics embedded in how bodies move.
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