Judith Sanchez Ruiz: A Fat Thought

TOPAZ ARTS welcomes Judith Sánchez Ruíz for the New York launch of her new book:

A Fat Thought – Notes on improvisation and sketches of process / Um Pensamento Encorpado – Notas sobre improvisação e desenhos de processos (bilingual publication in Portuguese / English)

Join us for an intimate performative forum celebrating the launch of A Fat Thought, a publication that explores improvisation as both artistic method and embodied inquiry through notes, drawings, reflections, and evolving creative processes developed throughout Sánchez Ruíz’s international career in contemporary dance and performance.

Blending performance, conversation, and dialogue, Sánchez Ruíz offers a rare glimpse into her choreographic thinking and improvisational structures that define her work. Books will be available for purchase and signed by the author.

“Like all journeys, this one is first and foremost an exploratory rite of passage inside your mind, a perspective refocusing and mental switch reading (...). Sánchez's contribution may be roughly summarized as developing a method to give structure to improvisational choreography, freeing mind and body from the tyranny of iteration.”
— Joaquín Badajoz, Cuban writer and journalist

Book Credits:
Writing and drawings: Judith Sánchez Ruíz
Editorial coordination: Joana Ferraz & Marina Matheus
Foreword: Joaquín Badajoz
English copy editing: Anna Barbosa
Portuguese editing: Ana Godoy
Proofreading: Joana Ferraz
Graphic design: Érico Peretta
Production: Associação Corpo Rastreado‬ @corporastreado

Photo credits: JSR Portrait by Arnaud Beleen; book photo by Mayra Azzi

About the Artist

Judith Sánchez Ruíz is a Cuban-born choreographer, performer, educator, and author whose internationally acclaimed career spans more than 35 years, and a body of work that includes over 50 stage and site-specific pieces, presented across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Known for her fearless improvisation, interdisciplinary collaborations, and deeply physical choreographic language, she founded JSR Company in 2010 as a platform for experimental work in dance, music, and visual art. She is the founder and director of PCDCP (Professional Contemporary Dance Certification Program), an intensive training and mentorship program for emerging and professional dance artists focused on performance, improvisation, composition, and contemporary movement research.

A longtime presence in New York’s contemporary dance scene, Sánchez Ruíz has presented work at major institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Danspace Project. In 2023, she made history as the first commissioned guest choreographer for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, premiering Let’s Talk About Bleeding at The Joyce Theater in New York, with funding from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and The O’Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation. Her recent projects include international commissions in Brazil, Slovakia, Germany, and Hong Kong.

After more than a decade in Berlin, Germany, initially by exclusive invitation in 2011- 2014 as a member of Sasha Waltz & Guests, she has further developed her own artistic methodologies and choreographic research. Her choreography sits at the intersection of embodied research and radical experimentation, blending improvisation with set movement. Within this context, Sánchez Ruíz has been described as a “body-displacer,” challenging dominant aesthetic norms, questioning institutional conventions, and positioning creative practice as both a political and ethical act. Her approach disrupts fixed ideas of authenticity and legitimacy in contemporary dance, particularly in relation to racialized and cultural identities.

Sánchez Ruíz returns to New York, bringing with her a globally informed and uncompromising artistic vision. Her practice—rooted in risk, precision, and transformation—continues to challenge boundaries and redefine the possibilities of contemporary dance in the city that first shaped her.

Special thanks to TOPAZ ARTS for presenting the first NYC event for the launch of her new book, A Fat Thought: Notes on Improvisation and Sketches of Process.

This program is part of TOPAZ ARTS' 25th Year Celebration, supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

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