Igal Perry

Igal Perry was born in 1950 in Tiberias.

Perry started dance studies and then continue to piano lessons in the local conservatory. At age 13, he joined a folkdance company in his home town, and later Yonatan Karmon’s company. In 1968, he began training in the Bat-Dor Studio, and shortly afterwards joined the company, where he worked with leading teachers and choreographers including Inesse Alexandrov, Benjamin Harkavy, John Butler, Rudi Van Dantzig, Alvin Ailey, Paul Sanasardo, and Lar Lubovitch.
After his military service, Perry moved to Holland in 1972, where he studied with Richard Gibson in the Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) and served as the Rotterdams Danscentrum’s ballet master. A year later, he returned to Israel and rejoined Bat-Dor as a teacher and rehearsal manager, where he choreographed his first dance, Beyond the Mirror. In 1976, he moved to the US and joined Dennis Wayne’s Dancers as ballet master and choreographer. During that period, he began working as John Butler’s assistant and kept staging his choreographies around the world in the following years.

In 1981-82, he headed the ballet department at Jacob’s Pillow and codirected the Clive Thompson Dance Company. At the same time, he choreographed for several companies, including Batsheva, for which he created three dances: The Last Curtain (1980), Autumn and Bolero (1983). In 1983 he opened a school of his own in New York: Peridance Capezio Center. A year later, he founded the Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, for which he choreographed some 50 dances staged in the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Joyce Theater and City Center.
In addition to working with his company, Perry is a guest teacher and choreographer with the Jacob’s Pillow Festival, the Ailey School, Marymount Manhattan College, and Juilliard, and teaches guest workshops in Italy, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Japan, Korea, and Israel.