6/12/17 2017 ADF School DESCRIPTIONS OF FOOTPRINTS AND 6WS REPERTORY PIECES

The following are descriptions of repertory projects whose auditions will be held during preview week. Read these descriptions carefully to choose which auditions to attend. If you are not cast in a piece during preview week – don’t fret! There will be many other performing opportunities, including the ICR concert, student concert, and faculty concert.

FOOTPRINTS OVERVIEW In Footprints projects, choreographers make a new work for ADF’s performance season using ADF students. It is strongly driven by its basic parameters: a new work needs to be made in a short amount of time! This means that Footprints requires a serious time commitment: casts will rehearse Monday through Friday (Wednesdays included); one weekend rehearsal each week is permitted; and the last two weeks of the festival will be largely spent in tech and dress rehearsals in the theaters. In these respects, Footprints is a window into how dance gets made in the professional world. Note that if you are someone who wants to delve into all WFSS has to offer, Footprints casts will be unable to take full advantage of WFSS. Students in Footprints may not enroll in a repertory course. Due to scheduling conflicts, students in Footprints will be unable to participate in the Student Concerts or International Choreographers in Residence Concert. They may participate in the Faculty Concert.

Gregory Dolbashian

Born and raised in , Gregory made his professional stage debut at the age of eight with the Glimmerglass Opera Company. Soon after, he was cast in the /Robert Wilson world tour of Einstein on the Beach. Gregory received his dance training at the Alvin Ailey School on a fellowship scholarship and then graduated cum laude from SUNY Purchase dance conservatory where he studied composition with Kazuko Hirabayashi. Since then he has gone on to dance and choreograph with a variety of artists, performing with Patrick Corbin, Nelly van Bommel, Sylvain Emard, and The Chicago . He was resident choreographer for both Chicago Ballet’s spring season in 2008 and CorbinDances in 2007. He was selected as one of four emerging choreographers in the Springboard Montreal intensive run by Alexandra Wells, where he created and premiered his first international work. Dolbashian is a recipient of The Bessie Schoenberg Residency at The Yard, winner of The Pretty Creatives Competition for Northwest Dance Project, and of The Hubbard Street 2 International Choreographic Competition. He also placed second in Ballet Austin's New American Talent competition, and has received commissions from Atlanta Ballet, TU Dance in Minnesota, Northwest Dance Project, CityDance Ensemble in D.C, and was the Resident Guest Artist at The Hartt School for the Spring 2013 semester under the direction of Stephen Pier. He has created school commissions at SUNY Purchase, Point Park University, University of Minnesota, DeSales University, NYU Tisch and the Juilliard School. He has held faculty positions at SUNY Purchase and The Hartt School. He debuted his own company, The DASH Ensemble, in December 2009 at JOYCE SoHo. The company has gone on to present works at the Skirball Center, DTW, The Gershwin Hotel, Guggenheim Works and Process Series, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, The Sheen Center, Riverside Theater, Summer Stage Central Park, Joe’s Pub, Musikfest presented by DanceNOW and The JOYCE Theater. The DASH received the audience award at NYC’s DanceNOW challenge at Joe’s Pub in 2013. The DASH also premiered “DAYWALKING”, a film at New York's Tribeca Cinemas in collaboration with fashion film director Charlie Wan and was a featured act in Dance at Bryant Park summer of 2014. The company also participated in ABT Principal Daniil Simkin’s INTENSIO, collaborating on a work with Gregory Dolbashian for principals and soloists of ABT which premiered at Jacob’s Pillow Ted Shawn Theater in 2015. In addition to his choreography, as a performer Gregory created a one man show titled Awkward Magic which had its debut at Joe’s Pub in 2014 and then was commissioned by American Dance Festival for the summer of 2015 performance series. Alongside Loni Landon, Gregory is the co-founder of The Playground, a choreographic initiative that was voted 25 to Watch in 2013 by Dance Magazine.

For the Footprints piece I am trying to build a giant web of connection, movement, and vibrancy. I plan on working with between 18-20 artists creating intricate movement and partnering sequences that are challenging for us and movement and vocabulary that has so many different textures of punch and flow. I want the piece to function as a touchstone of triumph, showing how the characters thrive and progress because of their link and connection to one another and their movements capabilities.

Learn more: https://vimeo.com/161927981

Shay Kuebler

Shay has been an independent dance artist in the city of Vancouver and Montreal for the past 8 years. Along with his successes as a collaborator and co-director, he has had the honor of performing and creating his own work for international dance festivals and dance companies across Canada. As a performer, he’s performed with Kidd Pivot, Holy Body Tattoo, Animals of Distinction, and The 605 Collective. As a choreographer he’s worked with Les Grands Ballet Canadiens, Citieballet, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, L’Ecole de Danse du Quebec, Simon Fraser University and Contemporary Dance School and as a co-founder of The 605

6/12/17 Collective, he co-directed and co-choreographed 3 projects with the company. With a foundation in the martial arts, he is constantly searching for how physical performance can be finely tuned yet retain an instinctual and raw quality. As a dance artist, whose professional performing and choreographic career has spanned the disciplines of Tap, Hip Hop, neo-classical Ballet and Contemporary, Shay also looks at how all techniques can reinforce and strengthen each other. That technique, when used in an instinctive manner, can be integrated into any other form – creating cross-disciplinary works that have a greater capacity to affect and reach audiences.

The Footprints piece will be built upon the idea of momentum and the momentum of one idea, one individual that can carry over and build to create a societal movement. This collection has the ability to identify us and connect us, yet also has the ability to separate us through our own individual expression or identity within this group movement. Eventually, individual expressions leads to separation and the conflict of opposing groups and collectives. My work has strong foundations in martial arts and urban dance, which combines with my background in other forms of dance to create my contemporary dance form. This work will look to build off of human/pedestrian movements, that grow and build in momentum to turn into monstrous and dynamic movements. The piece will look to tightly weave individuals into a collective movement that eventually splits into smaller groups/sects that compete against each other for space and presence. The works looks to speak towards how ideologies and value systems can grow and alter from their origins to become a way of life that further separates us rather then connects us.

Gesel Mason

Gesel Mason is Artistic Director for Gesel Mason Performance Projects and an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She was a member of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and Ralph Lemon/Cross Performance Projects. Her solo performance project, NO BOUNDARIES: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers, has featured the work of Robert Battle, Rennie Harris, Dianne McIntyre, Donald McKayle, Bebe Miller, David Rousséve, Reggie Wilson, Andrea E. Woods Valdéz, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. NO BOUNDARIES recently received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support the live final performance and a new commission by Kyle Abraham. Mason utilizes dance, theater, humor, and storytelling to bring visibility to voices unheard, situations neglected, or perspectives considered taboo. Her most recent choreographic project, antithesis, collides the genres, bodies, and cultures of postmodern and erotic dance in order to challenge how female sexuality is perceived, performed and (re)presented. antithesis is a 2015 Map Fund recipient.

For Footprints, I am creating an original group work based on themes developed in antithesis. The project, which builds upon poet Audre Lorde’s essay, "Uses of the Erotic," is an embodied attempt to explore and mine the erotic as a source of power and creative possibility. The intent is to craft a work that embraces the sometimes messy, gritty, tactile, growling, chaotic, passionate, and tender edges of human expression; what Lorde refers to as “the yes within ourselves.” Experimentation, risk, and collaborative investigation are a part of my creative process. Vulnerability, humor, and visceral physicality are hallmarks of my work. My movement vocabulary includes solo, group and partner work that encompasses the intimate and rhythmic, the sensual and percussive, the gestural and sweeping, and the recognizable and unpredictable. I often play with physical and cultural markers in ways that transgress and transcend identity. I'm interested in a performer's ability to be human whether they are standing, speaking or moving fully.

Lucinda Childs (staged by Jorge Pérez Martínez)

Lucinda Childs began her career at the Judson Dance Theater in 1963 where she choreographed thirteen works and performed in works of Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Robert Morris. Since forming her dance company in 1973, she has created over fifty works, both solo and ensemble. In 1976, she collaborated with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass on the opera Einstein on the Beach, as principal performer and choreographer for which she received a Village Voice Obie award. In the subsequent revival in '84 Childs choreographed the two "Field Dances" for the opera. Childs has appeared in a number of Wilson's major productions among them, Marguerite Duras' Maladie de la Mort, Wilson's I Was Sitting on my Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, Heiner Muller's Quartett, and Wilson and Glass' opera White Raven and Arvo Part’s Adams Lament. and collaborated with Robert Wilson and Mikhail Baryshnikov on Wilson’s new production Letter to a Man which premiered in Spoleto Italy in 2015. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979 for her collaboration, Dance, with music by Philip Glass, and film décor by Sol LeWitt. In a Washington Post review of Dance, Alan M. Kriegsman wrote, "a few times, at most, in the course of a decade a work of art comes along that makes a genuine breakthrough, defining for us new modes of perception and feeling and clearly belonging as much to the future as to the present. Such a work is Dance". Since 1981, she has choreographed over thirty works for major ballet companies which include the , Les de Monte Carlo, and Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Company. She has also worked as choreographer and more recently both choreographer and director for sixteen opera productions including Mozart's Zaide for La Monnaie in , Stravinsky's Le Rossignol et Oedipe, Vivaldi's Farnace, and Handel's Alessandro, voted "Opera of the Year" by Mezzo-TV 2013. In 2014 she directed a new production of John Adams Dr. Atomic for the Opera du Rhin and Jean Baptiste Lully's Atys and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice for Opera Kiel in Germany. The Summerscape Festival at Bard College commissioned the revival of Dance in 2009, which continues to tour in the United States

6/12/17 and Europe and is currently included in the repertory of the Lyons Opera Ballet. Available Light (1983) with music by John Adams and set by architect, Frank Gehry was revived for the 2015-16 season, and she is recently choreographed Beethoven’s Grande Fugue for the Lyons Opera Ballet, which premieres in November, 2016. Childs received the Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement in 2001, and was elevated from the rank of Officer to Commander in France's Order of Arts and Letters in 2004, and in 2009 she received the NEA/NEFA American Masterpiece Award.

Jorge Pérez Martínez (stager) Jorge Pérez Martínez, born in Spain, studied classical and contemporary ballet in the Real Conservatorio Professional de Danza de Madrid, after his graduation he worked in different companies in Spain (Santamaria Compañia de Danza, Ballet de Carmen Roche), France (Europa Danse), Switzerland (Stadttheater Ballet Bern) and Holland (Introdans). During his professional trajectory, he has performed a very diverse repertoire on international stages all around the world from renowned choreographers as Jiri Kylian, , Glen Tetley, Lucinda Childs, Nacho Duato, Nils Christe, Mats Ek, and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, among others. In the last few years he has been active as a choreographer creating pieces for Introdans and Generale Oost (The Netherlands), the Landerstheater Eisenach (Germany), ENDANZA (Spain), the ISDS Hong Kong, and teaching ballets from Lucinda Childs in different venues in America and Europe.

Lucinda Childs on her Choreography and Creative Process: “Choreography is an art form which is for me quite unpredictable. I’m never really sure what will happen when I walk into the studio with my dancers. I always say that I’m not really mathematically inclined, but I do a great deal of measuring with counts as a way to explore the possible options for arranging the dancer’s relation to each other in space and in time. This derives from the influence of John Cage in the early sixties when we used chance methodology to step out side the realm of personal choice in making creative decisions. Those of us from the Judson Dance Theatre were also involved in exploring pedestrian or found movement activity, which was not considered to be part of any traditional dance vocabulary. Some of my phrases still develop from simple changes of direction in half turns or full turns, which generates the movement of the upper body and arms while the foot-work is very precise and bound by certain tempos all the dancers must abide. I still work with a limited set of phrases that are distinct from one another but never entirely unrelated to the original first phrase created. So, in the end, one sees the same material repeated over and over again but never in the same way.”

Lucinda Childs pieces to be staged in Footprints:

Concerto (1993) Music: Henryk Gorecki, “Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings” Premiere: Grande Auditório, Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal.

Kilar (2013) Music: Wojciech Kilar Premiere: Created for Introdans. Rotterdamse Schouwburg, Arnhem, Netherlands

6WS REPERTORY CLASS OVERVIEW

The repertory courses for the Six Week School include learning products and processes from renowned choreographers and companies as well as recreating or creating a work by an established choreographer. Repertory projects culminate in a final showing at the end of the summer. These informal showings are unticketed and open to the ADF community and general public. Repertory projects do not rehearse outside of their regular meeting time, enabling students to participate in all WFSS classes. Students enrolled in repertory classes may also participate in the Faculty Concert, International Choreographers in Residence Concert, and the Student Concerts.

Charles Anderson With the understanding that the body carries history and is burdened and inscribed with meaning, Anderson’s repertory class will work with him to create (Re)Current Unrest: In D’Nile. The second installment in his latest project with his company, Charles O. Anderson Dance Projects, (Re)Current Unrest: In D’Nile explores the kinesthetic state of unrest-the condition of unease, discontent, and social disturbance through Anderson’s choreographic process of kinetic storytelling. This physical state of agitation is kinesthetic metaphor for ‘staying woke.’ To stay woke refers to an intangible level of awareness about community issues and social justice, but the specific meaning changes depending on the speaker. Kinetic Storytelling is defined as a mode of devising dance-based theater that is at once formal choreography, lyrical word-weaving, and explicitly informed by Africanist aesthetics.

6/12/17 Influenced by the compelling issues of our day, by leaders and instigators of change and revolution, we will explore how to speak through our art approaching dance-making as a practice of social justice and a metaphor for testimony.

Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Company Repertory, taught by Shayla-Vie Jenkins The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company repertory class will draw inspiration from the intricate integration of speech and movement embodied in the company’s current work, Analogy/Dora:Tramontane. A main focus of class will be delving into our own imaginative interplay of text and movement. We will research interviews by inspired figures of today to source and create a spoken text framework. Within this framework, we will learn repertory and generate movement language that engages the company’s values of rigor, sensitivity, musicality, partnering work, and dynamic phrasing. Class will culminate in a performance showing of our unique version of Analogy.

Merce Cunningham Repertory, taught by Andrea Weber The Cunningham Repertory class will delve into the complexity and vast range of Merce’s work throughout the decades. In six weeks, we will learn excerpts of choreography that explore space and time, rhythmical footwork, clarity of line, and stillness. At the end of the Intensive we will show an “Event”, the excerpts put together in a new order just for this occasion. “Events are Cunningham’s signature, site-specific choreographic collages that incorporate excerpts from past and current repertory works, and are often created for unconventional performance spaces such as museums and galleries.”

WFSS REPERTORY

Sherone Price This repertory class employs traditional West African dance movements along with contemporary vocabulary. We use African dance styles to create contemporary choreography. Students will have the opportunity to explore and expand their musicality as dancers as well as to explore and expand their movement vocabularies. We strive to create a supportive, encouraging and engaged dance community in the class. The class is appropriate for dancers with or without prior experience with traditional West African dance. Students who are chosen for this repertory class will be committing to rehearsals on Wednesdays and Saturdays for the entire 6 weeks.