Who am I?
Ethan Digby-New is a professional dancer, performer, and screen actor based in New York City. He attended the UNC School of the Arts' BFA Contemporary Dance program on the NextNow Award, where he spent years building a rigorous technical foundation across contemporary, ballet, and somatic practices.
He has performed with Disney Cruise Line in full-scale theatrical productions for international audiences, and with RWS Global, one of the world's foremost live entertainment production companies. He has worked with the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, and has appeared at venues including the RAMKAT, the Carolina Theatre, the Van Dyke Theatre, and others across the region.
But beneath the professional work, a quiet question had been building for years: why do we dance? Not as a metaphor, no. Literally. Across every continent, every era, every language barrier and political border, human beings have always gathered to move together. What does that mean? What does it tell us about who we are when we strip away everything else?
The 1DanceProject is his attempt to follow that question to its source. Not in a library or a lecture hall, but in the rooms and courtyards and temples where these traditions are still alive, still being passed from body to body, still carried forward by the people who refuse to let them disappear.
He arrives at each tradition with no claim to mastery and no agenda beyond genuine curiosity. He is not a scholar of these forms. He is a trained performer who has spent his life learning how to learn, and who believes that the act of asking someone to teach you is, itself, one of the most honest things a person can do.
