Kathleen Hermesdorf
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Kathleen Hermesdorf
Kathleen Hermesdorf (January 31, 1967–November 29, 2020) was a dancer, teacher, choreographer, improviser, producer, and curator, born in Wisconsin, USA, and a long-time resident of San Francisco. Career in Dance and Choreography From 1998 to 2020, Kathleen co-directed, with musician Albert Mathias, the dance companies ALTERNATIVA and MOTIONLAB, having already worked in a collaborative artistic partnership together since 1995 after meeting as members of Sara Shelton Mann's performance co-op Contraband. Hermesdorf also directed or co-directed several other companies including Hermesdorf & Wells with Scott Wells, Collusion with Stephanie Maher, and Fake Company. As a dancer and performer, Kathleen was a core collaborator in the companies of Margaret Jenkins Dance Company (1993–1999), Contraband/Sara Shelton Mann (1993–2008), and Bebe Miller Dance (2002–2009). Hermesdorf obtained a BFA in Dance from Western Michigan University, and an MFA in Dance Performance and Pedagogy f ...
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Contraband (performance Group)
Contraband, a collection of artists led by director/ choreographer Sara Shelton Mann, was a dance-based, live performance ensemble, working together from 1985 to the mid 1990s. Based mainly in San Francisco, the group became known for its lively, electrifying performances, often politically charged and community-engaging. By utilizing dance, music, set, text/spoken word, and site-specific work, Contraband came to develop a cross-disciplinary performance aesthetic, as well as approach to dance and dance training, that would have a profound influence on Bay Area dance, performance art, and culture, as well as performance practice abroad. Emerging with the 1985 work ''Evol'', the group went on to combine contemporary dance with contact improvisation, live music, ritual, activism, innovative set design, and work with experiential states (see essential states), developing a more expressionistic approach to dance and theater on the West Coast. Many members have continued on to furt ...
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Margaret Jenkins
Margaret Jenkins (born 1942) is a postmodern choreographer based in San Francisco, California. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1980 and in 2003, San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown, declared April 24 to be Margaret Jenkins Day. Biography Jenkins began her early training in dance in her hometown of San Francisco with Judy and Lenore Job, Welland Lathrop, and Gloria Unti. She continued her dance studies at the Juilliard School and the University of California at Los Angeles. During the 1960s she returned to New York and danced with Jack Moore, Viola Farber, Judy Dunn, James Cunningham, Gus Solomons Jr. and Twyla Tharp's original company with Sara Rudner. Additionally, In addition, Jenkins was a member of the faculty of the Merce Cunningham Studio for 12 years and in that time restaged his works throughout the United States and Europe.Margaret J ...
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Bebe Miller
Bebe Miller (born 1950) is an American choreographer, dancer, and director. Career Miller was born in 1950 in Brooklyn, New York. Following her graduation from Ohio State University with a degree in dance, Miller danced in the troupe of Nina Wiener for six years. She formed her own company, Bebe Miller Dance, in 1984. Miller was a professor of dance at the Ohio State University from 2000 to 2017, holding the rank of Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities when she retired. Miller was awarded with an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Ursinus College in 2009. Awards * Creative Artists Public Service Fellowship, 1984, for choreography; * New York Foundation for the Arts Choreographer's Fellowship, 1984 and 1991; * National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer's Fellowship, 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988; * New York Dance and Performance Award ("Bessie") for choreography, 1986, and 1987; * American Choreographer Award and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, b ...
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The Seattle Times
''The Seattle Times'' is a daily newspaper serving Seattle, Washington, United States. It was founded in 1891 and has been owned by the Blethen family since 1896. ''The Seattle Times'' has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Washington (state), Washington state and the Pacific Northwest region. The Seattle Times Company, which is owned by the Blethen family, holds 50.5% of the paper. McClatchy company owns 49.5% of the paper. ''The Seattle Times'' had a longstanding rivalry with the ''Seattle Post-Intelligencer'' newspaper until the latter ceased publication in 2009. Copies are sold at $2 daily in King & adjacent counties (except Island, Thurston & other WA counties, $2.5) or $3 Sundays/Thanksgiving Day (except Island, Thurston & other WA counties, $4). Prices are higher outside Washington state. History ''The Seattle Times'' originated as the ''Seattle Press-Times'', a four-page newspaper founded in 1891 with a daily Newspaper circulation, circulation of 3,500, which M ...
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Amara Tabor-Smith
Amara Tabor-Smith (born 1965) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based choreographer and performer noted for significant contributions to dance that draw on, celebrate, and reconfigure African-American and women's history. Career Tabor-Smith spent a decade as a dancer, then Associate Artistic Director with the internationally acclaimed Urban Bush Women dance company of New York City, where she was a part of developing the company's early community engagement methodologies. As founder of Deep Waters Dance Theater, she creates choreographic work rooted in ritual and exploring issues facing people of color and the environment. Her 2011 work ''Our Daily Bread'' - which explored what and how we eat - included live cooking and eating and was described as "a theatrically cogent, emotionally rich piece of dance theater that made us laugh at ourselves and want to scream at the end." Tabor-Smith won a San Francisco Guardian 2013 ''Best of the Bay'' award for ''He Moved Swiftly But Gently Down the No ...
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Brontez Purnell
Brontez Purnell (born July 2, 1982) is an American writer, musician, dancer, and director based out of Oakland, California. He is the author of several award-winning books, including ''Since I Laid My Burden Down'' (2017), ''100 Boyfriends'' (2022), which won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, and the punk zine ''Fag School.'' Purnell is the frontman for the punk band ''The Younger Lovers'' and is the founder of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. Early life and education Purnell grew up in Triana, Alabama. His great-grandfather, "Hard Rock" Charlie Malone, an accomplished bottleneck guitarist who played the Chitlin' Circuit from Chattanooga to Chicago in the 1930s, was the father of the musician J.J. Malone. Purnell created his first zine, ''Schlepp Fanzine'', at the age of 14''.'' Work After moving to Oakland at 19, he created ''Fag School'' out of "wanting there to be a '' Sassy'' for gay boys." "I hadn't really seen a zine or at least a personal gay zine that dealt wi ...
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Keith Hennessy
Keith Hennessy (born 1959 in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada) is a San Francisco-based dancer, choreographer, and performance artist regarded as a pioneer of queer and AIDS-themed performance. He is known for non-linear performance collages that combine dance, speaking, singing, and physical and visual imagery, and for improvised performances that often undermine the performer-observer barrier. Hennessy directs CIRCO ZERO, which has received commissions from Les Subsistances (Lyon) & Les Laboratoires (Paris), FUSED (France-US Exchange), as well as funds from the Zellerbach Family Fund, San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, and The San Francisco Foundation. Hennessy's performances are embedded in leftist and anarchist social movements; his career began in anti-nuclear juggling, acrobatics, and vaudevillian comedy. In 1982, he hitchhiked to California for a juggling convention, and stayed. In his San Francisco living room he co-founded the grassroots p ...
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Qigong
''Qigong'' (), ''qi gong'', ''chi kung'', ''chi 'ung'', or ''chi gung'' () is a system of coordinated body-posture and movement, breathing, and meditation used for the purposes of health, spirituality, and martial-arts training. With roots in Chinese medicine, philosophy, and martial arts, ''qigong'' is traditionally viewed by the Chinese and throughout Asia as a practice to cultivate and balance '' qi'' (pronounced approximately as "chee"), translated as "life energy". ''Qigong'' practice typically involves moving meditation, coordinating slow-flowing movement, deep rhythmic breathing, and a calm meditative state of mind. People practice ''qigong'' throughout China and worldwide for recreation, exercise, relaxation, preventive medicine, self-healing, alternative medicine, meditation, self-cultivation, and training for martial arts. Etymology ''Qigong'' (Pinyin), ''ch'i kung'' ( Wade-Giles), and ''chi gung'' (Yale) are Romanized words for two Chinese characters: ''qì'' (/ ...
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Contact Improvisation
Contact improvisation is a form of improvised partner dancing that has been developing internationally since 1972. It involves the exploration of one's body in relationship to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movement awareness. It has evolved into a broad global community of social dancing around "jams" characterized by their welcoming attitude towards newcomers to dance, as well as seasoned practitioners, and is often found overlapping with ecstatic dance communities. American dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton originated contact improvisation, drawing from his past training in aikido, a martial art form, to explore and push boundaries with his colleagues and students to develop this new practice. Contact improvisation plays with the artistry of falling off balance, counterbalance, finding the shelves of the body, learning the mechanics of the body in order to handle someone else's weight or be lifted, breathing techniques, and can involve the ...
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Bates Dance Festival
Bates College () is a Private college, private liberal arts college in Lewiston, Maine. Anchored by the Historic Quad, the Campus of Bates College, campus of Bates totals with a small urban campus which includes 33 Victorian Houses as some of the dormitories. It maintains of nature preserve known as the "Bates-Morse Mountain" near Campbell Island (Maine), Campbell Island and a coastal center on Atkins Bay. With an annual enrollment of approximately 1,800 students, it is the smallest college in its athletic conference. As a result of its small student body, Bates maintains selective admit rates and little to no transfer percentages. The college was founded on March 16, 1855, by abolitionist statesman Oren Burbank Cheney and textile tycoon Benjamin Bates IV, Benjamin Bates. Established as the Maine State Seminary, the college became the List of coeducational colleges and universities in the United States, first coeducational college in New England and went on to confer the first f ...
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San Francisco Chronicle
The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. de Young. The paper is owned by the Hearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco. The paper benefited from the growth of San Francisco and had the largest newspaper circulation on the West Coast of the United States by 1880. Like other newspapers, it experienced a rapid fall in circulation in the early 21st century and was ranked 18th nationally by circulation in the first quarter of 2021. In 1994, the newspaper launched the SFGATE website, with a soft launch in March and official launch November 3, 1994, including both content from the newspaper and other sources. "The Gate" as it was known at launch was the first large market newspaper ...
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American Dancers
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer * B ...
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