Tere O’Connor: Not a Patriarch, but a Conceptual Artist All the Same

Daniel Clifton and Matthew Rogers in Tere O'Connor's Wrought Iron Fog (2009).

Catch-all phrases tend to flash up to describe Tere O’Connor’s work: masterful, technical, traditional, artisanal, abstract, structural, and most telling, “not conceptual.”  Claudia LaRocco, writing recently for The New York Times, went out of her way to partition O’Connor from his younger peers in dance.  She postulated that O’Connor’s work remained “rigorously movement-focused” at a time when many choreographers are placing themselves in a broader context of “conceptually driven live art and multimedia projects.”