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PROGRAM 2
Friday, February 10 @ 7 pm
Laura Katz Rizzo, PA
Anna Bauer, TX
five two Dance Company, NY
QYDC (Qu Yang Dance Company), NY
Li Chiao-Ping Dance, WI
Miranda Brown + Noa Rui-Piin Weis, NY
Edu Hernandez, NY
Gloria McLean Lifedance, NY
Christopher Compton, AZ
Delicate Cactus Choreography, WI
Freespace Dance, NJ
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Laura Katz Rizzo holds a BA in History and English, an Ed. M. in Dance, and a Ph. D. in Dance and Women’s Studies. She has performed with several ballet and contemporary dance companies, and as an independent performer and choreographer. Her screen dances have been selected and screened at film festivals across the world. Laura is author of Dancing the Fairy Tale: Producing and Performing “The Sleeping Beauty” (Temple University Press, 2015), and many other publications. Laura has delivered master classes at dance institutions worldwide and is currently an associate professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. She will perform ‘Kinetic Sinterphase,” a duet for mother and daughter using minimalist ballet vocabulary as a starting point for embodying the torus shaped electromagnetic field that surrounds everything on the planet. The dance evokes the spark of life, the ineffable element of aether, and the natural process of mitosis.
Laura Kats Rizzo © Brain Mengini
Anna Bauer is an emerging choreographer and dancer with a BFA in Dance from Sam Houston State University. She dances for the Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company in Austin, Texas, while continuing to produce her own choreography. Her current work investigates nuance and gesture- how can pedestrian movements build worlds and establish unique characters on the stage? Over the past three years, Anna has presented her work at festivals across Texas, including Agora Artists’ SEEDS Concert, Blipswitch’s Offbeat X, Houston Fringe Festival, and Austin Dance Festival.
In 2022, she had the opportunity to show work at Modern American Dance Company’s Dare to Dance Showcase in St. Louis and Mashup Dance Company’s International Women’s Day Dance Festival in Los Angeles, as well as reset her duet Breakfast on the dancers of Bellingham Repertory Dance in Washington for their 2022 Fall season.
Anna Bauer © Elysia Perkins
five two Dance Company © John A Fleming
NYC based emerging artists, Olivia Passarelli and Sophie Gray-Gaillard, began collaborating in 2021 to form five two Dance Company. five two’s work has been featured in Steffi Nossen Dance Foundation’s Fall Showcase, KoDaFe International Dance Festival, and in various showcases at Salvatore Capezio Theater, Arts on Site, Balance Arts Center, Green Space, i KADA Dance Center, KYL/D’s Dance Center, Triskelion Arts, Dixon Place, and the Ailey Citigroup Theater. Most recently, five two was awarded the Director's Choice Award at the Spring for Spring Dance Festival in Metuchen, NJ, and the company premiered their first full work “If ever” at Studio 3R at Arts on Site. Weightless explores the notion that when someone new emerges within our orbit, we instrinctly shift. We were drawn to this concept by the cyclical yet transient nature of fascination, attraction, love, commitment and by how these facets loop endlessly around our sense of self, having monumental influences on our evolving identity.
QYDC (Qu Yang Dance Company)
Born and raised in Hunan Province, China, Theo began his dance training in New York State. His choreography is a mixture of the influences that have defined his experience in both China and the United States In 2021, Theo went back home for a year to reconnect with his roots, and in 2022, he founded Qu Yang Dance Company to teach and to perform his original choreography. His vision for the company is to create dance works that incorporate influences from both eastern and western aesthetics and ideologies, while still addressing topics/issues that are closely related to our current society.
Acquaint (Premiered in April 2022) is a dance piece set for ChoreoLab at State University at Buffalo for the first live performance without facial masks. It is about people acquainting themselves and each other through the medium of water. In other words, the piece is also a celebration of self-love and human interaction.
Qu Yang Dance Company © Ken Smith
Li Chiao-Ping Dance (LCPD) © Maureen Janson Heintz
Reflecting and supporting the artistic vision of Li Chiao-Ping and promoting acceptance and respect through our work, Li Chiao-Ping Dance (LCPD) pushes the edges of contemporary/modern dance while producing and presenting highly original performance works. The company offers stimulating, thoughtful, creative, and educational workshops and touring programs for community and pre/professional dance artists, including diverse populations, youth, and older adults.
LCPD is very excited to return to New York City and the SoloDuo Festival to present two original works: Sur La Table and concrete. Sur La Table (premiered at the Chazen Museum in Madison, WI 2020) is a duet featuring Elisabeth Roskopf and Piper Morgan Hayes that highlights the trademark physicality and cheeky humor of LCPD. concrete (is a new solo that will premiere in Madison in November 2022), featuring Kimi Evelyn in a work that explores chronic themes of inequality and harassment in a patriarchal society, especially for women of color, i.e. the “concrete ceiling”.
Miranda Brown + Noa Rui-Piin Weis © Andy Santana
Miranda Brown + Noa Rui-Piin Weis BFFLs investigating what it means to make a (good) dance joke. Our individual and collective work has been presented by Pageant, Fertile Ground, WAXworks, Current Showcase (Take.5), Motion State Dance Film Festival, SERIOUS PERFORMANCE!!!!, and the Movement Lab at Barnard College. As performers, we have worked with Hope Mohr/Maxe Crandall, Grant Jacoby, Emily Coates, Mia Martelli, and Adrienne Truscott. Both graduates of Barnard College, we have trained with Caroline Fermin, Colleen Thomas, Jodi Melnick, Doug Varone, David Dorfman, and Yvonne Rainer, among others. After finishing our previous research on dance, copyright, and the lines between pop and post-modern art, our latest work explores genre taboos. Continuing with choreographic devices such as comedy and structural repetition, our new work inappropriately pairs musical and dance styles and asks, “why does this feel wrong?”
Eduardo Hernandez is a Los Angeles based dancer and choreographer. His work is heavily influenced by absurdism and iconoclasm themes that constantly bring delusions or challenges as an acknowledgement for self being. As a result, his movement practice centralizes in improvisation or set choreography based on error-chance choices in order to bring authenticity or purposeless experiences.
His work DAESEIN from the German philosophical word “Dasein,” translates to presence or existence, yet it is a piece about the absurdism of living while it manifests a hopeful outcome. In addition, DAESEIN is an exploration work based on the Humphrey principles and the somatic principles of release.
Constance Nicolas Vellozzi © Athena Azzevedo
GLORIA MCLEAN is a dancer, choreographer and teacher based in NYC and Andes, NY. After gaining critical acclaim as a leading member of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company (1982-1993) she formed LIFEDANCE/Gloria McLean & Dancers, and began making work that reveals the dancer as a whole person in a living context of physical, psychological, social, and aesthetic concerns. LIFEDANCE is a practice integrating life and art through the creative process. Her pieces range from pure dance to socially
minded issues and site-specific interventions. Ms. McLean creates dance in relation to new music, visual art and the environment, finding imagery that speaks to the human condition. Known as a master teacher, she has taught full-time at George Washington University, UW/Madison, and was Assistant Professor of Modern Dance at Keimyung University in Daegu, South Korea for two years. She now teaches in NY and at her studio in the Catskills. Ms McLean is also the President of the American Dance Guild helping to produce festivals and events for the dance community.
For White Wave, Ms. McLean is re-imagining an older work titled “Before the Mask”, a study of the performer’s process of transformation.
LIFEDANCE/Gloria McLean & Dancers © Yi Chun Wu
Christopher & Dancers © Miranda Meyer
4.2465 light years. That’s the distance from our sun to its nearest relative, Proxima Centauri. If we could put ourselves in the place of the sun… How must that feel? To know there is someone else like you out there, but too far away for any real connection. Is there comfort in knowing that they are there, no matter the distance? Do you ache with loneliness at knowing that you’ll never be together? Or do you escape into a dream where distance is erased, and you can finally feel their touch.
Proxima Centauri premiered at the University of Arizona School of Dance on Nov. 8, 2020.
Christopher Compton is an Assistant Professor of Ballet at UArizona, and has had an eclectic career dancing with Twyla Tharp, Pennsylvania Ballet, Koresh Dance Co., and as a ‘Johnny Castle’ in the North American Premiere of Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage.
The University of Arizona School of Dance offers an equal emphasis approach to technical training and performance in ballet, modern and jazz that optimally prepares dancers for future professional careers in dance upon graduation.
Delicate Cactus Choreography © Piper Morgan Hayes
Delicate Cactus Choreography: Piper Morgan Hayes-Werner is a Dance Lecturer at UW-Whitewater. She has taught at several colleges throughout Wisconsin and often accompanies students at the American College Dance Association festivals. Choreographically, her work is seen in the annual DanceScapes production, on campus Theatre/Dance Musical productions and local performances. She guides students in Tap, Jazz and Contemporary dance courses with focus and open discussions on the importance of non-Eurocentric dance practices and their rootedness of African culture and arts. In addition, she performs as a company member with Li Chiao-Ping Dance Company in Madison.
Things Done, Things to Come, Things Left Undone is an exploration of growth, depth, trauma and stuckness in Hayes’ life which focuses on the connection to numerology, death, birth, and words that have bruised and built her life thus far.
Freespace Dance, under the artistic direction of Donna Scro Samori, a former principal dancer with the Nikolais/Louis Dance Company and a founding member of Sean Curran Company, is renowned for creating emotionally driven work with a bold, athletic signature style. The company's performance credits include Citi Center, Ailey Citigroup, DTW, Joyce SoHo, Peridance, St. Mark's Church, NJPAC, SOPAC, OSPAC, Fringe Festival Edinburgh, DUMBO, and Jacob’s Pillow.
My Back to You, premiered in January of 2020, is a tender and yet tense duet that reflects the many different aspects of a relationship and the willingness to stay committed through the ups and downs. Even when my back is to you, I am still with you. FSD is grateful for the following support; The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, NJSCA, Hyde & Watson Foundation, NJ Cultural Trust, and New Music USA.
Freespace Dance © John Herr