Eryn Renee Young is a freelance choreographer and founding artistic director and resident choreographer of XAOC Contemporary Ballet, a New York City-based neoclassical ballet company. Her choreography, which has been described as “dynamic… pulsing… [with] a fine sense of exploring space and a knack for visual polyphony,” has been showcased and commissioned across the NYC metro area. The name XAOC (pronounced zay-ock) is derived from the Greek ‘χαος,’ which means ‘chaos’ and implies explosive creation. It is meant to portray the spirit of the company as they move ballet into the future, while maintaining strong ties to classical form.
Ms. Young is an inaugural fellow of the Jacob’s Pillow Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellows Program through which she received mentorship from New York City Ballet choreographer Lauren Lovette, and she is a 2018 resident choreographer of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts Choreographic Institute under the direction of Susan Jaffe with choreographic mentorship from acclaimed choreographer Helen Pickett. She has been commissioned annually since 2012 by Norte Maar for their CounterPointe series celebrating women making work on pointe and since 2016 has created collaborative works with female visual artists for this program. Her commissioned work “Voyager I” for the Columbia Ballet Collaborative premiered in November 2018 in New York City alongside works by NYCB’s Silas Farley and ABT’s Zhongjing Fang, and was restaged for XAOC Contemporary Ballet in Spring 2019. Her 2019 commission from Eryc Taylor Dance for their “EARTH” presentation featured an original commissioned score by composer Stephanie Ann Boyd.
Her choreographic work has been showcased at the Battery Dance Festival, The Ailey Citigroup Theater, NYC Summer Streets Dance Festival, the Young Choreographer’s Festival at Symphony Space, Boston Contemporary Dance Festival, the White Wave Dumbo Dance Festival at the Jay Street Theater and the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center, Dance at Socrates, Mark Morris Dance Center, the Martha Graham Studio Theater, Hatch, the Choreographer’s Canvas, NYC10: an initiative for NYC Dance Week, Dance New Amsterdam, Triskelion Arts Center, Steps on Broadway, the Algonquin Arts Center, Peridance Capezio Center, the Boston Conservatory, the Bart Leukede Theater, the Stevens Center in Winston-Salem, the Agnes DeMille Theater at U. North Carolina School of the Arts, and New York University, among many others. Additional accomplishments include selection as a 2017 Resident Artist for Dance at Socrates at Socrates Sculpture Park, selection as a finalist of the 2015 Edward Villella Choreographers Competition, an Eryc Taylor Dance New Choreography Grant, selection for the 2013 Dance/USA Institute for Leadership Training, selection for the 2013 Women in Dance Series, and a 2015 Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant for her ballet outreach program “Project Ignite.”
She holds a degree in Contemporary Ballet Choreography and Fine Art from New York University, where she was mentored by acclaimed choreographer Kathryn Posin. She is also grateful to count among her mentors such luminaries as Lauren Lovette, Jacqulyn Buglisi, Helen Pickett, Risa Steinberg, Dianne McIntyre, and Molissa Fenley. She began choreographing in 2007