Since 2013 Lillian Stillwell has choreographed opera, dance, musical, theater and interdisciplinary productions in Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Germany and the USA. Her choreography aims to reveal the structural and emotional content of music through movement.
She received her classical training at Ballet Arts Minnesota and the Milwaukee Ballet and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Dance from the University of Minnesota. As a dancer, Lillian Stillwell was active for 15 years in Minneapolis, New York City and Germany, performing and touring with Emily Johnson, Shapiro & Smith, Alexandra Beller, Pam Tanowitz, Gerald Casel, Josef Frucek / Linda Kapatanea, Yosef Berg & Oded Graf, Stephanie Tiersch, Evangelos Poulinas, Merixtell Checa Esteban and from 2005 – 2012 with Johannes Wieland. She began dancing for Wieland in NYC and continued with him at the State Theater in Kassel, Germany where she also received her first choreographic commissions.
In 2015 she choreographed Leonard Bernstein’s MASS at Theater Lübeck with over 150 singers, dancers and actors and children. In 2016 she was nominated for Best Choreography by Musicals Magazine for JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR at Theater Basel. In 2017 she was a guest choreographer at Choreolab Basel. In 2019 she conceived and choreographed SILBERLICHT for two dancers and the Parisian Baroque Ensemble Diderot at the Philharmoine Luxembourg. In 2019 she founded Dance Jam Berlin, a forum for movement research and community building in a non-competitive environment, taught improvisation at the Braswell Arts Center in Basel, and was a guest teacher at the University of Minnesota Dance Program. She is currently developing AFTERLIFE, an duet using electronic dance music inspired by club culture and the search for immortality.
This season her work can be seen in CORO FANTASTICO, an interactive music theater production at Theater Heidelberg in Germany and in the Monteverdi opera ORPHEUS at the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen.
She lives in Basel.
