Our lives occur simultaneously as the lives of others.

Rachel Meyer regards performance as a complete experience, with elements such as the venue, the invitations and programs, the costumes, the lighting, the set, musicians and even the audience seen as active protagonists working alongside the dancers.

She is interested in choreography focused on the sub moments occurring in-between, or during, the main movements of the work. Rachel sets up an ecosystem of relationships between the performers, with multiple trajectories of the narrative occurring simultaneously, at times perceived only in the audiences’ peripheral vision. These separate worlds are sometimes indifferent to one another, sometimes coexist, and rarely, collide.

Photo by James O’Mara

Rachel Meyer grew up in Illinois, trained with St. Louis Ballet and received her BFA at the University of Utah. She trained at the Northwest Professional Dance Project and the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, danced with Utah Regional Ballet and was a guest artist with Aspen Santa Fe Ballet and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens.

From 2009-2011, Rachel was a member of Dominic Walsh Dance Theater where she danced works by Dominic Walsh, Mauro Bigonzetti, Vaclav Kunès, Jiří Kylián, and Mats Ek. She was awarded a Princess Grace Award in 2010. In 2011, she danced at the Tate Modern in London with the Michael Clark Company. Rachel was a member of Ballet BC from 2011-2017 where she performed works by Sharon Eyal, William Forsythe, Jacopo Godani, Johan Inger, Emily Molnar, Crystal Pite, Cayetano Soto, Lesley Telford, Medhi Walerski, among others.

From 2017 on, Rachel has worked as an independent choreographer/dancer. She was a Resident Artist at Left of Main from 2020-2022, and a Ballet BC Artist in Residence during the 2021-2022 season.

Rachel respectfully acknowledges that she lives and works on the unceded, ancestral and traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh).