Sara Romersberger
Associate Professor
Sara Romersberger, Movement Specialist, holds a B.S. in theatre education from Illinois State University, an M.A. in dance from the University of Illinois, and a Certificate of Mime/Movement from Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris, France.
Classes taught: Lecoq-based movement classes include placement, acrobatics, neutral and character mask, masks of the Commedia Dell' Arte, European clown, historical movement styles (Renaissance and Restoration) and dance of the 20th century.
Prior to coming to SMU, she held full-time faculty positions at Illinois Wesleyan University (tenured 1988), West Virginia University, and Elon College, N.C. With strong roots in modern dance and jazz, Ms. Romersberger has choreographed over fifty university and professional musical theatre productions and has danced (Julie Maloney Dance Company and Wendy Osserman Dance), directed, choreographed, and performed her own brand of movement theatre off-Broadway in New York at The Mint Theatre (Jackson Pollock: In The Painting) and Primary Stages (Hanna: A Run-On Odyssey).
At SMU, Professor Romersberger directed Peer Gynt, The Children’s Hour, Twelfth Night, and Anything Goes, and also designed/created commedia masks for her production of The Three Cuckolds at SMU. She designed movement and dance and/or fight choreography for numerous Meadows Theatre productions: highlights include Mill on the Floss, Love’s Fire, Red Noses, The Threepenny Opera, As Five Years Pass, The Illusion, and The Robber Bridegroom, as well as Street Scene (SMU Opera). She also developed and workshopped a new musical, Boomerangst, for which she wrote the book and lyrics. In November 2006 she was awarded a Meadows Foundation Grant to produce and choreograph two productions of La Discreta Enamorada with Spanish director Gustavo Tambascio. The play was produced at SMU in English as part of the Division of Theatre season with students and subsequently with Dallas Spanish actors in Spanish.
Her professional work in the Dallas area since 2000 includes directingTripping the Light Fantastic for the Festival of Independent Theaters and creating or coaching movement, dance and/or fight choreography for The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, All’s Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream - the musical, As You Like It, A Comedy of Errors, and The Compleat Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) at the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas; for Anna in the Tropics, Hamlet, Wit and Crumbs From the Table of Joy at the Dallas Theater Center; for Greendale, Waiting for the Train, Blasted, The Late Henry Moss, A Man's Best Friend, and Silence at the Undermain Theatre; for Misery at Circle Theatre in Fort Worth; and forThe Last Five Years at the Plano Repertory Theatre as well as additional shows at Theatre Three, Classical Acting Company and Contemporary Theatre of Dallas. She was a winner of a Dallas Theatre Critics award and a 2005 Rabin award for Special Recognition for Outstanding Choreography for her work on The Wrestling Season at Dallas Children’s Theater.
Regionally she choreographed stage combat, dances and physical comedy for The Comedy of Errors at the Unseam'd Shakespeare Co., Pittsburgh, 2002, and created the physical characters for two one-woman shows by Karen Grey for the Baltimore Theatre Project, 2002 and 2004.
Nationally she is currently president of The Association for Theatre Movement Educators, and she has conducted movement workshops at such locales as Boston University, the University of South Carolina, the National Theatre of the Deaf and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2002, she completed her CD ROM, "Unlocking the Physicality of Shakespeare's Comedies with the Masks of the Commedia," and was invited to present at MASKS, a national conference on masks of the theatre.
Internationally, she choreographed and served as assistant director for two operas, Hangman, Hangman and The Town of Greed (both world premieres), at Teatro de la Zarzuela, Madrid, Spain, September 2007 and subsequently in Barcelona with a new cast at Gran Teatre del Liceu in November 2007.
She also has taught internationally at the South African Performers' Voice and Movement Educators Conference in Pretoria, South Africa and the 1st International Festival of Making Theater in Athens, Greece, in July 2005 and at the Teatro Punto’s Master Classes Festival in Amsterdam in summer 2009.