Graduate Dance Alumni

Alumni News: Elle Hong

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 19:07:32 +0000

Alumni News: Elle Hong Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/05/2021 - 13:07

Graduate Alum Elle Hong (MFA in Dance) has a pop-up gallery exhibit opening this weekend, October 9th, in Denver! The exhibit titled “Visceral Vicinities: Altars, Ritual, The In-Between” and curated by Cherish Marquez and Cal Duran, will be hosted at the BRDG Project, 1553 Platte St., starting at 6:00 PM. The gallery is “an exploration into the power of altars, performance, and visual representation and their relationships to the metaphysics of life and death.” At 8:00 PM, Elle will be performing a piece with their partner and collaborator, Cipriano Ortega, titled “Sitting/With”.

“Sitting/With is a dance with death. Two dancers and two chairs ruminate on culturally-specific death rituals, the stoicism that accompanies news of forthcoming death/a death that has already occurred, and forms of care that are birthed through the trauma of recognizing one’s mortality. Space and silence are not treated as empty, but instead, filled with the presence of memories, phantasmal visitors, tensions, and things we want to say but never will. The dancers embody these ideas through crafting a ritual of healing and reckoning.

Sitting/With is a coping strategy for recognizing that death forges on in the psychic realms of the living—that we are simultaneously possessed and dispossessed by recognizing what we lose, and furthermore, what we gain.”

The exhibit runs through November 1st. Masks are required for attendance.

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UNC Names New Performing and Visual Arts Dean: Cristina Goletti

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 20:04:29 +0000

UNC Names New Performing and Visual Arts Dean: Cristina Goletti Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/28/2021 - 14:04

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Erinn Liebhard

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 17:55:21 +0000

Erinn Liebhard Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/10/2020 - 11:55

Dance MFA Alum (2015) Erinn Liebhard recently received an excellent review for her company Rhythmically Speaking's reimagined annual production featuring choreographers creating work inspired by jazz and American social dance ideas! Check out the review here and learn more about Rhythmically Speaking and her other work in education and performance here.

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Bonnie Cox

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 17:50:16 +0000

Bonnie Cox Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/10/2020 - 11:50

Bonnie Cox received her MFA in Dance at The �鶹ӰԺ in Spring 2018. She was nominated for an Austin Chronicle critic’s choice award for her production Silence to Power: Dance as a response to trauma, through which she encouraged dance artists to transform trauma and societal pressures into growth and power through performance and choreography.

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Lara Branen

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 17:48:17 +0000

Lara Branen Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/10/2020 - 11:48

Lara Branen (BA, 1977; MFA, 1987) continues to direct the �鶹ӰԺ Jazz Dance Workshop with another alumni, Chris Harris.

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Marsha (Tardy) Barsky

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 17:46:11 +0000

Marsha (Tardy) Barsky Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/10/2020 - 11:46

Marsha (Tardy) Barsky- MFA, �鶹ӰԺ (2003), Marsha Barsky, Assistant Professor, teaches courses in contemporary dance, choreography, the Alexander Technique, and dance studies. Barsky serves as the Director of Dance at MTSU, and as the artistic director for the MTSU Dance Theatre. Barsky developed MTSU's Bachelor’s of Science degree program, the first of its kind in Tennessee.

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Joy French (MFA, 2010)

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 17:31:54 +0000

Joy French (MFA, 2010) Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/10/2020 - 11:31

Joy French is the founding member of Bare Bait Dance Company and is an instructor in the University of Montana dance department.

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Angie Simmons (MFA, 2004)

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 17:28:22 +0000

Angie Simmons (MFA, 2004) Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/10/2020 - 11:28

Angie Simmons is a Visting Artist at The University of Southern Mississippi for AY 15-16.

She holds an M.F.A. in dance choreography from the University of Colorado-�鶹ӰԺ, with an emphasis in the Alexander Technique, and a B.S. in secondary dance education from Illinois State University.

Simmons is former modern faculty for Longmont Dance Theatre Academy’s Pre-Professional Training Program and was adjunct dance faculty at Red Rocks Community College in Denver, Colorado. She has taught at various Denver metro studios and schools, been a company instructor for 3rd Law Dance/Theatre, and worked with arts in public school programs in Chicago and Minneapolis. Angie served as a resident guest artist in 2012 at Middle Tennessee State University, teaching and setting choreographic work focused on diversity, as well as a 2010 guest artist at Iowa State University. As Program Director and faculty, Simmons founded RHS Modern Dance Company, a collaborative arts outlet for Minnesota high school students.

Simmons is the Artistic Director/choreographer/founder of Evolving Doors Dance, a contemporary modern company founded in 2006. The company is known in Colorado for politically charged, evening-length works. It recently premiered new work while completing its first tour of the midwest and will present this work in Colorado in October. Angie has been granted by Colorado’s Neodata Endowment Fellowship, the �鶹ӰԺ Arts Commission, and the Colorado Open Door Foundation. She has choreographed, taught and performed in New York, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, and throughout the midwest. Simmons has performed professionally with Isis Movement Company and Tribe of Human in New York and Cindy Brandle Dance, 3rd Law Dance/Theatre and Louder Than Words Dancetheatre in Colorado. Angie has also worked on individual projects with Maedée Dupree, Tom Evert, Jon DeMone, Doug Woods, David Dorfman, Toby Hankin, Nada Diachenko, Megan Flood, Nick Cave/William Gill, and various works with USM alumni Gabe Masson.

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Aerialist & Alumnae Terry Sendgraff Passes

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 18:23:41 +0000

Aerialist & Alumnae Terry Sendgraff Passes Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/29/2019 - 12:23

Thank you to Nancy Smith for sharing the following:

Terry Ann Sendgraff, dance pioneer, matriarch of aerial dance, visionary artist, and deeply influential teacher transitioned peacefully in her home in Oakland California on September 6, 2019. She was 85 years old.

An icon in the San Francisco Bay Area, Terry influenced the fields of performance, improvisation, and aerial dance. Her reach extends nationally and internationally, and can be felt in the bodies of artists, friends, and colleagues across all disciplines. She has been called the “mother of aerial dance” because of her impact on so many aerial artists.

Terry was born on October 12, 1933 to Harold (Terry) and Ruth M. Dolson in Ft. Myers, Florida where her desire to dance and to fly was first ignited. Her family relocated to New Castle, Pennsylvania when Terry was nine. Terry earned her BA in Recreation from Pennsylvania State University in 1955.

Teaching in the public schools of Colorado, Terry fashioned a career in both dance and gymnastics. She was involved in crafting the earliest national standards for competitive gymnastics for girls and women, earned her MA in Dance from the University of Colorado, �鶹ӰԺ, and coached women’s gymnastics and taught dance at Arizona State University. During her studies, Terry’s exposure to the work of Alwin Nikolais, Jose Limon, Charles Weidman. and Merce Cunningham were a great inspiration, nourishing her developing aesthetic.

Invigorated by the rigor and structure of the forms she was studying, Terry was increasingly drawn to awareness-oriented movement forms and fueled by the freedom of improvisation. Determined to find her own dance, Terry moved to California where she developed a movement and performance practice, pedagogy, and opus that blended her extensive dance and gymnastics backgrounds with her passion for improvisation and the emerging counterculture of 1970’s Bay Area. Terry’s teaching style was influenced by the developing “Motional Improvisation” work of her mentor and lifelong friend Al Wunder.

Years before the term aerial dance was popularized, Terry had a studio full of flying dancers working from her innovative low flying trapezes. She named her work Motivity. Terry is credited with discovering and deploying in performance the single point trapeze that allowed expansive possibilities not seen with parallel rope trapezes. Over time, aerial dance emerged as a popular post-modern dance genre that has grown and taken root as an almost ubiquitous part of the contemporary performing arts vocabulary.

The essence of Motivity, though, was Terry Sendgraff herself. With her keen ability to elicit the gifts and unique voice of each student, she helped them to hone their aesthetic values. She used a system of heightened sensory awareness while on the ground and in the air, a rigor of practice in the present moment that called out the best and the wholeness of her students and colleagues. Motivity was an embodied blend of personal, political, and spiritual.

While Terry’s choreography ranged from whimsical to profound, and her performance persona from innocent to sophisticated, her audiences were treated to unexpected surprises. Between 1974 and 2007, Terry created over three hundred performances including her celebrated birthday performances (1974-83) and her unprecedented A Year of Sundays (1977-78). Performance venues ranged from a golf course fairway to a proscenium stage. She directed several distinct but related dance companies including Fly By Nite (1978-1980)—the first women's trapeze dancing troupe in the country—and the Motivity Company (throughout the 1980’s and beyond).

An irrepressible art spirit, Terry Sendgraff kept innovating. In addition to her multi-level trapezes, she was among the first to use bungee cords in dance performances. Struck with breast cancer in 1984, her process, her recovery, and her one-breasted body became the subject of several pieces including one of her most memorable (and acclaimed) works, Hovering (1988). Launching into another performance medium, Terry took up stilt walking at age 57 to create Women Walking Tall (1991-95). Originally a commissioned performance for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Women Walking Tall expanded to a community project that empowered hundreds of women to walk, dance, and perform on stilts.

The enthusiasm that met Motivity—both the aerial work and her teaching of sensory awareness, presence, and improvisation—led her to explore more deeply what she called the marriage of the “motional and the emotional,” by earning a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from John F. Kennedy University in 1986.

Terry Sendgraff received many honors throughout her career, including Isadora Duncan Dance Awards for Solo Performance (1989) and Sustained Achievement (2005). She was a featured artist and faculty member at the Annual International Aerial Dance Festival in �鶹ӰԺ, Colorado (1999-2005). Her career was also chronicled by Jeff Friedman as an oral history for The Legacy Project (1991). She received numerous grant awards, most notably a Choreographer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993-1994) and Artist Residencies from the California Arts Council (1993, 1994). In 1990, PBS aired Can You See Me Flying: A Portrait of Terry Sendgraff, by filmmaker Fawn Yacker. A larger than life sized bronze sculpture of Terry is part of a group of sculptures called Dance (1974), created by John Waddell that can be viewed in front of the Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix, Arizona. She published her memoir Can You See Me Flying: Memoir of an Aerial Dance Pioneer in July 2018.

Terry will be remembered as a creative choreographer, a brave performer, and as a master teacher. Her gentle and kind guidance allowed so many to blossom physically and emotionally, each encouraged to find their own dance. Countless performance luminaries collaborated or studied with Terry. To name only a handful, the list includes Nancy E. Smith (Frequent Flyers), Krissy Keefer (Dance Brigade), Anne Bluethenthal (ABD Productions), Al Wunder (Motional Improvisation), Jill Guillermo-Togawa (Purple Moon), and Judith Smith (AXIS Dance Company). Some of Terry’s musical and visual collaborators were Gwen Jones, Kayla Kirsch, Jeannine Chappell, Karen Vogel, Carolyn Brandy, Debbie Fier, and Jennifer Berezan.

Terry is survived by her loving wife, partner, and best friend of nearly 35 years, Aileen Moffitt. She will long be remembered and celebrated by a large group of loving friends, colleagues, collaborators, dancers, and students.

Memorial gifts can be made to the Terry Sendgraff Scholarship Fund or to the charity of your choice. Scholarship donations can be made to a fund at coloradogives.org (Frequent Flyers International Aerial Dance Festival) or through the San Francisco Aerial Arts Festival. For information regarding the fund or for details of Celebration of Life to be held in November, please contact terrysendgraffmemorial@gmail.com.

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Michelle Ellsworth wins major award for dance

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 20:22:51 +0000

Michelle Ellsworth wins major award for dance Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/22/2019 - 14:22

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