COLLABORATING ARTISTS
| Kate Weare | |||
| Ann Carlson | Joanna Haigood | Stephen Petronio | |
| Sonya Delwaide | David Linton | June Watanabe | |
Mario Alonzo (Costume Design) has been a principal dancer with the Oakland Ballet Company since 1978. He has worked with such legendary choreographers as Tandy Beal, John Butler, Val Caniparoli, Agnes DeMille, Fredrick Franklin, Kurt Joos via Anna Markardt, Alonzo King, Eugene Loring, Leonide Massine, Irina Nijinska, Anna Sokolow, and Anthony Tudor via Sallie Wilson. Mr. Alonzo has also turned his artistic attention to costume design and choreography. He has designed costumes for 10 Oakland Ballet premieres and 8 reconstructions. He has also designed costumes for AXIS, San Francisco Opera, Gilbert Reed Ballet, the Rolling Stones, and Broadway Cares Equity Fights Aids. Mr. Alonzo received an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for costume designs for AXIS Dance Company's 2001 Home Season. Mr. Alonzo made his choreographic debut for the Oakland Ballet's Silver Anniversary with Epiphany. Since then he has choreographed The Picture for Men Dancing, In the Nick of Time for Summerfest, A Night In Vienna, Mio Bobbino, and The Unraveling for Oakland Ballet.
Eve Beglarian (Composer & Sound Designer) is a composer and performer whose chamber and orchestral music has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the California EAR Unit, Relâche, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Orchestra X and Dinosaur Annex, among many others. Her work in music theater includes Mabou Mines' Animal Magnetism, Ecco Porco, and Dollhouse, all directed by Lee Breuer; the collaboration Hildegurls' Ordo Virtutum, which premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival; Forgiveness, with director Chen Shi-Zheng and Noh master Akira Matsui; and the China National Beijing Opera Theater's production of The Bacchae, also directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. She has written music for choreographers Victoria Marks, Ann Carlson, Robert La Fosse, Monica Levy, and Cydney Wilkes, among others. Current projects include an opera based on Stephen King's The Man in the Black Suit, and A Book of Days, a long-term project of 365 multimedia pieces for live performance as well as internet delivery. Recordings of Eve's music are available on CRI Emergency Music, OO Discs, Accurate Distortion, and Kill Rock Stars. Please visit http://www.evbvd.com for more information.
Ann Carlson (Choreographer) - From Lincoln Center to the dairy farm, the gallery to a frozen pond, Ann Carlson's award winning work defies description and category while expanding the context of choreography and performance. Ann works as an individual artist, drawing from the disciplines of choreography, performance, theater, public and conceptual art. Her work has been presented throughout the United States and Europe, Mexico and Russia. Ms. Carlson often works in a series format. The Real People series is an on-going group of performance works created with and performed by people gathered together by a common profession, activity or other relationship. The Real People works have included lawyers, ranchers, doctors, security officers, basketball players, a mother and daughter, fly fishers and fiddlers, corporate executives, a farmer and her dairy cow, among others. Her second series of works, Animals is a suite of five dances that incorporates live animals into performance. Her third series of works, White, examined issues of privilege and love in American popular culture(s). Night Light is a series of site specific performance installations; the central strategy is the re-staging of archival photos in the tradition of tableau vivant. Ms. Carlson and her partner/collaborator, video artist, Mary Ellen Strom recently completed a video/performance installation entitled Geyser Land. The audience boarded a train and traveled 25 miles over the Bozeman Pass in Montana witnessing projections onto rock faces, performances on the train and tableau along the landscape. Ann has been commissioned by dance companies, museums, theaters, alternative performance spaces, galleries, art centers, festivals, corporations, universities and individuals. Her awards include a 2004 Artist-in-Residency Award at Rockefeller&Mac250;s Bellagio Foundation, 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography, a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in performance, awards from the National Choreographic Initiative in 2001 and 2003, a Doris Duke Award for new work in 2000, a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance in 1999. She was the first choreographer to receive the Cal/Arts Alpert Award in l995. Originally from Park Ridge, Illinois, Ann graduated magna cum laude from the University of Utah with a BFA in modern dance and earned a masters degree as the first graduate student in dance at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Ms. Carlson lives in New York City.
Remy Charlip (Choreographer/Dancer/Artist/Author) was named a National Treasure in a documentary of a program honoring his work A Celebration of Remy Charlip at the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. His art work has been shown in major exhibitions at the Lincoln Center Library in New York City, The Remy Charlip Library in Greenville, Deleware, the San Francisco Main Library with a retrospective Remy Charlip's World where he was designated a Literary Laureate and at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles where he performed his dance play Amaterasu-The Sun Goddess and was named their first Artist-in-Residence. Other honors and awards include The Best Picture Book of 1969 at the Bologna Book Fair, two New York Village Voice OBIE awards for directing plays, three New York Times "Ten Best Illustrated Books of the Year", four San Francisco Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, eleven National Endowment of the Arts grants, and most recently he received the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Lifetime Achievement Award. Charlip has just received his second grant tot live in Japan by the Asian Cultural Council of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. He will do research with the artists and writers living in the picture book village (Ethon Mura) on the folktales in their prefecture. He will oversee his Air Mail Dance choreography, the creation of stories and pictures and the design of a series to be published in Japan. Then he will live in Kyushu where he has been named Artist-in-Residence by the Mayor of the town of Ohgushi. His thirty-one picture books include such classics as Fortunately, I Love You, Arm in Arm, The Dead Bird, Mother Mother I Feel Sick Send for the Doctor Quick Quick Quick, and most recently, Sleepytime Rhyme.
Eileen Cooley (Lighting Designer), along with Liz Stillwell and Monique L'Heureux is a partner in the Dance Design Alliance. She currently serves as Lighting Designer for such companies as the Pasadena Dance Theater, Kin Dance Company, Danza Floricanto/USA, AVAZ International Dance Theater, Viver Brasil and Marion Scott's Spirit Dances. She has been honored with six Lester Horton Awards for Excellence in Lighting for Dance. Recent designs for theater include Fritz Coleman's The Reception at the Vistory Theater and the West Coast debut of Andrew Lippa's Wild Party at UCLA. Her work in theater has earned her two Dramalogue and one L. A. Weekly Award for Lighting Design.
Sonya Delwaide (Choreographer), a native of Quebec, formerly the resident choreographer and Artistic Director of the "Compagnie de Danse L'Astragale," in Quebec is currently based in Berkeley, CA. Since 1983 her choreography has been presented in Canada, United States and more recently in France and Brazil. Her choreographic experience spans from contemporary ballet and modern dance to theatre, film and television. [Ms.Delwaide is a Fine Arts graduate of York University in Toronto. She has trained with Merce Cunningham, Twyla Thwarp, and Douglas Dunn.] Ms.Delwaide has worked with such companies as "Mel Wong Dance" (NYC), Oberlin Dance Collective (San Francisco) and Desrosiers Dance Theatre (Toronto). [She has been invited to teach at the school of the National Ballet of Canada, les Grands Ballets Canadiens, the Ce'gep of Drummondville and various professional studios in the US and Canada.] Ms.Delwaide currently teaches at Berkeley Ballet Theater and Shawl-Anderson Dance Studio in Berkeley.
Katie Faulkner (Choreographer). Originally from North Carolina, Katie received her MFA in dance performance & choreography from Mills College in 2002. Since moving to the Bay Area in 2000, Katie has performed the works of Mark Morris, Trisha Brown, Jeff Slayton, Mary Cochran, Bill T. Jones, Stephen Petronio, June Watanabe, Victoria Marks, Abigail Hosein, Kim Epifano and Ann Carlson. She has worked with several of these choreographers through AXIS Dance Company with whom she has been performing both locally and nationally since 2003. She is also a dancer with Randee Paufve’s Paufve Dance and has performed with them in the Bay Area and at the Joyce Soho Theater in NYC. She has enjoyed teaching students of all ages and abilities around the country and at institutions such as Santa Clara University, Marin Ballet, Dance Theatre Seven, Paden Elementary and Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. Katie is the artistic director of her own little seismic dance company, which presented its first full program in August, 2006 at CounterPULSE in San Francisco. Her choreography has been presented by the Renaud-Wilson Dance Festival, the Julia Morgan Center’s Dance Is Festival, the Oakland Dance Festival, the WestWave Dance Festival, Randee Paufve’s 8x8x8 series, and the Monterey Dance Festival. She is slated to be Artist-in-Residence at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center from January – June 2007.
Fred Frith (Composer) is both pioneer and prolific participant in the area where rock music and new music meet. Co-founder of the legendary British band Henry Cow in 1968, he moved to New York ten years later, where he became associated with the so-called "downtown scene" along with John Zorn, Lesli Dalaba, Ikue Mori, Bob Ostertag and others, and an instigator of the groups Massacre, Skeleton Crew, and Keep the Dog. Current projects include Maybe Monday, with Larry Ochs (sax) and Miya Masaoka (koto), and Normal (with Sudhu Tewari). Fred also composes extensively for film (Rivers & Tides, The Tango Lesson), as well as for groups like the Arditti Quartet, the Ensemble Modern, Rova Sax Quartet, and Asko Ensemble. He has taught improvisation workshops and masterclasses on five continents, as well as being composer-in-residence at institutions in the USA, France, Germany and Switzerland. His most recent work, The Right Angel for electric guitar and orchestra, was premiered in Amsterdam in June 2003. Fred is no stranger to the dance world, having improvised with Sally Silvers and Marguerita Guergue in New York, and composed for many choreographers, including Rosalind Newman, Bebe Miller and Paul Selwyn Norton, over the last twenty years. In particular his ongoing collaborations with François Verret in Paris, Amanda Miller in Freiburg, and Peggy Piacenza in Seattle have proved among the most intense and creative of his career. Fred's nomadic encounters are the subject of Werner Penzel and Nicolas Humbert's prize-winning film Step Across the Border. He is currently Professor of Composition at Mills College in Oakland, California. www.fredfrith.com
Joe Goode (Choreographer) has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. In 1998, Joe Goode was awarded one of the first Irvine Fellowships in Dance. In 1995, Goode was one of only ten U.S. choreographers to receive a prestigious National Dance Residency Program grant, an award for artistic development. Joe Goode has been recognized for excellence by the American Council on the Arts and the Business Arts Council/San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. His dance works have been commissioned by Pennsylvania Ballet, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Ririe Woodbury Dance Company, AXIS Dance Company, Center for Theater Arts at University of California Berkeley and Zenon Dance Company. The M.H. de Young Memorial Museum of San Francisco and the Capp Street Project have commissioned his performance/installation works. Goode teaches at Dancers Group Studio in San Francisco and has guest lectured throughout the United States. Joe G oode Performance Group was formed in 1986 and has toured nationally. Additionally, the company has appeared in Canada, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Africa. For more information, visit www.joegoode.org.
Joanna Haigood - In 1980, Joanna Haigood relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York and co-founded ZACCHO Dance Theatre. Her work centers on making dances that use natural, architectural and cultural environments as a point of departure for movement and narrative. She also specializes in creating work that incorporates aerial flight and suspension. She has been commissioned by Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Dancing in the Streets, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, San Francisco Arts Commission, Black Choreographers Moving Festival, Boston Dance Umbrella, Festival d'Avignon and Festival d'Arles in France. Ms.Haigood has been awarded fellowships from the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gerbode Foundation, New Langton Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and is a 1998 CalArts/Alpert Award recipient. Additionally, her choreography is in the reperto ries of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, San Francisco's Lines Contemporary Ballet and Axis Dance Company of Oakland, California. Ms.Haigood has taught at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine and the Centre National des Arts du Cirque in France, the Laban Centre in England, San Francisco Institute of Choreography and at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. For more information, visit www.zaccho.org.
Margaret Jenkins is a choreographer, teacher, and mentor to many young artists as well as a designer of unique community-based dance projects. Jenkins began her early training in San Francisco. In the sixties, she moved to New York to study at Juilliard, continued her training at UCLA and returned to New York to dance in the companies of Jack Moore, Viola Farber, Judy Dunn, James Cunningham, Gus Solomons and Twyla Tharp’s original company with Sara Rudner. In addition, Jenkins was a member of the faculty of the Merce Cunningham Studio and often restaged his works for companies in Europe and the United States. In 1970, Jenkins returned to San Francisco, opened one of the West Coast's first studio-performing spaces and formed her own Company in 1973, for which she has made over 75 works touring regularly throughout the U.S. and abroad. Jenkins’ recent activities have included a residency in Kolkata, India (2003) to create a new dance for the Tanusree Shankar Dance Company, the premiere of a new site-specific work, Danger Orange (2004) San Francisco, a three-week teaching residency in Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Beijing, China (2004), and the premiere of running with the land (2005) at the opening of the new de Young Museum in the Barbro Osher Sculpture Garden, commissioned by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation. In November of 2005, Jenkins and five members of her Company were invited to Kochi, India to participate in a four-week rehearsal and performance residency. The extended time in India allowed Jenkins to work with Indian dancers in collaboration with her Company to develop source material for the evening-length piece, A Slipping Glimpse which premiered at YBCA in the Gardens and the Forum on May 17, 2006. A Slipping Glimpse will premiere in Calcutta, India in January 2007, followed by an extensive tour of the United States in the fall. For her unique artistic vision, Jenkins has received numerous commissions and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Irvine Fellowship in Dance, the San Francisco Arts Commission Award of Honor, the Bernard Osher Cultural Award. She is committed to an art of inquiry and to advance the field through a variety of projects: Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME), Choreographers in Action (CIA), and the Center for Creative Research in New York. The Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab hosts many of these activities and provides a unique rehearsal space for artists including her Company. For more information, please visit http://www.mjdc.com.
Bill T. Jones, a 1994 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, began his dance training at SUNY at Birmingham, where he studied classical ballet and modern dance. After living in Amsterdam, Mr.Jones returned to SUNY where he became co-founder of the American Dance Asylum in 1973. Before forming Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in 1982, Mr.Jones choreographed and performed internationally as a soloist and with his late partner, Arnie Zane. In addition to creating over 40 works for his own company, Mr.Jones has received many commissions to create dances for modern and ballet companies including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Boston Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet, Berkshire Ballet, Berlin Opera Ballet, Diversions Dance Co., and others. Mr.Jones has received several other prestigious awards including the Creative Artists Public Service Award in choreography, two Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a N.Y. Dance and Performance ("Bessie") Award (Bill and Arnie), a "Bessie" for his work, D-Man in the Waters, an "Izzy" award for Perfect Courage (collaboration between Bill, Rhodessa Jones, and Idris Ackamoor), Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts Award, Dance Magazine Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from Bard College. http://www.billtjones.org/
David Linton. Originally a percussionist, David Linton has created dance, theater, and performance events and is equally well-known for his live wired solo electro-acoustic drumkit performances and his soundscore productions. His solo LP Orchesography (1986) was an influential collusion of early sampling tek with street beats and theatrical post modernism. By the early 90's, began to concentrate on the vocabulary of entirely electronic music and the resultant paradigm shift in performance priorities that this new compressed format suggested. Linton became a dedicated advocate for the expansion and appreciation of realtime performance in electronic media through the design and production of event/environments such as SoundLab (1996) and eventually UnityGain (1997-present). Since 2002, Linton's fascination with instantaneous collaborative audio visual communication among select units of electronic musicians and visualists has assumed the form of the live television Manhattan cable/webcast project Unitygain Television (UGTV), for which he is producer/director and an occasional performer.
Victoria Marks is an independent choreographer who also serves as an associate professor of choreography in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. Before taking her post at UCLA in 1995, she lived in London, where for three and a half years she worked on her own choreographic projects and served as head of choreography at London Contemporary Dance School. Marks' piece, "Against Ending" won four 2002 Lester Horton Awards. She has been a recent recipient of a California Dancemaker Grant and a Cultural Affairs (Los Angeles) grant. Marks was honored with the 1997 Alpert Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography, and has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the London Arts Board, among others. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship in Choreography, and numerous awards for her dance films, including the Grand Prix in the Video Danse Festival (1996 and 1995), the Golden Antenae Award from Bulgaria, the IMZ Award for best screen choreography and the Best of Show in the Dance Film Association's Dance and the Camera Festival.
Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new opera, musical theater works, films and installations. Her ground breaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which we have no words. She has alternately been proclaimed as a “voice of the future” and “one of America’s coolest composers.” During a career that spans more than 40 years she has been acclaimed by audiences and critics as a major creative force in the performing arts. Since graduating Sarah Lawrence College in 1964, Monk has received numerous awards throughout her career, including the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1995, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, and three “Obies”. Her music has been heard in numerous films, including La Nouvelle Vague by Jean-Luc Godard and The Big Lebowski by Joel and Ethan Coen. A new publishing relationship with Boosey & Hawkes makes Meredith Monk's music available to a wider public for the first time. In 1968 Ms. Monk founded The House, a company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance. In 1978 she formed Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble to expand her musical textures and forms. She has made more than a dozen recordings, most of which are on the ECM New Series label. Her music has been performed by numerous soloists and groups including Chorus of the San Francisco Symphony, Musica Sacra, The Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Double Edge, and Bang On A Can All-Stars, among others. Monk is a pioneer in site-specific performance, creating works such as Juice: A Theater Cantata In 3 Installments (1969) and most recently American Archeology #1: Roosevelt Island (1994). She is also an accomplished filmmaker who has made a series of award-winning films including Ellis Island (1981) and her first feature, Book Of Days (1988), which was aired on PBS, shown at the New York Film Festival and selected for the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. In October 1999 Monk performed a Vocal Offering for His Holiness, the Dalai Lama as part of the World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles. In July 2000 her music was honored by a three-concert retrospective entitled Voice Travel as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Her music theater work, mercy, a collaboration with visual artist, Ann Hamilton, premiered at the American Dance Festival in July 2001 and toured the United States and Singapore. Her first orchestra piece ‘Possible Sky’ commissioned by Michael Tilson Thomas for the New World Symphony, premiered in April 2003 in Miami. Current projects include a new work for the Kronos Quartet, which will premiere in London at the Barbican Center in January 2005. July 2004 marks the beginning of an eighteen-month celebration of Monk’s 40th year of performing. http://www.meredithmonk.org/
Alexander V. Nichols' (Lighting Designer) design work spans from lighting and projections to scenery and costumes for dance, theater and opera. He has worked extensively in the Bay Area with many companies and artists including Berkeley Repertory Theatre, ODC/SF, Joe Goode Performance Group, Zaccho Dance Theater, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Rinde Eckert, the Magic Theater and, since 1986, the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. He has created designs for a variety of choreographers including Val Caniparoli, Mark Morris, Graham Lustig, Jean Grand Maitre, Kirk Peterson, Christopher d'Amboise and Michael Smuin. Mr. Nichols' work can also seen in the repertoire of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hong Kong Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, BalletMet/Columbus, Singapore Dance Theatre, Richmond Ballet, North Carolina Dance Theatre and the National Theater of Taiwan. He has received two Isadora Duncan Dance Awards for visual designs with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Co.
Stephen Petronio was born in Newark, New Jersey, and received a B.A. from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he began dancing in 1974. Petronio was the first male dancer of the Trisha Brown Company, where he danced from 1979 to 1986. He founded Stephen Petronio Company in 1984. Since then, Petronio has received international acclaim for his ground-breaking choreography and the company has toured extensively across the United States, Canada, Europe, South America and Russia. Petronio has collaborated with artists such as Wire, Yoko Ono, Beastie Boys, Diamanda Galas, Sheila Chandra, Cindy Sherman, Donald Baechler, Stephen Hannock, Justin Terzi, Leigh Bowery, Paul Compitus, Manolo and Tanya Sarne of Ghost. In April of 1998 Petronio premiered his first evening-length work Not Garden at San Francisco's Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens. Long time collaborator David Linton created the musical score for Not Garden with visual designs by Tal Yarden and artist Stephen Hannock, and costume designs by Ghost. Petronio has been awarded choreography fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts from 1985 to 1988, and company grants from the NEA and the New York State Council on the Arts since 1988. He is also the recipient of numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts award, the first American Choreographers award in 1987, and a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for his dance Walk-In in 1986. He has been commissioned to create new works for companies including William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet (1987), the Tulsa Opera (1990), the Deutsche Opera Berlin (1992), the Lyon Opera Ballet (1994), the Maggio Danza Florence (1996), and the Ricochet Dance Company of London (1998). http://stephenpetronio.com
Shelly Senter (Dancer/Choreographer/Rehearsal Director) has performed and taught throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia and Russia; independently and collaboratively, with many artists in the New York, San Francisco and international dance and art communities and as a member of such companies as Bebe Miller and Company and the Trisha Brown Company. As an improviser and choreographer, her work has been commissioned internationally. She continues to work with the Trisha Brown Company as a guest artist on special projects, and was recently awarded an Isadora Duncan (Izzy) award for her performance of Brown's Choreographic Material from Glacial Decoy and Foray Foret. Her work as a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique has been written about in various dance and A.T. publications, and is known for it's application and influence in the arts. Other projects with AXIS include directing Secret Ponies by Stephen Petronio.
SoVoSo- From the Soul to the Voice to the Song - the widely acclaimed vocal ensemble SoVoSó wows each and every audience with their innovative compositions, unique arrangements, intricate rhythms and imaginative improvisations. Singing a compelling mix of jazz, R&B, world, pop and gospel music, SoVoSó has achieved top honors on the contemporary a cappella scene, receiving "First Prize" and "Audience Favorite" at the National Harmony Sweepstakes. SoVoSo includes founding members of Bobby McFerrin's Voicestra. The group will often invite the audience to join in a spontaneous vocal invention, and is a always a big hit with their "circlesinging/teambuilding" workshops and educational programs for all ages. This culturally diverse and close-knit ensemble won the 1999 Isadora Duncan "Best Score" Award for their collaboration with the Robert Moses' Kin dance troupe, and were nominated again in 2002 for "Resonate" with Project Bandaloop. Their many artistic collaborations include the visually and soulfully stirring mutlicultural show, Song Circus, produced by well known dancer/coreographer Tandy Beal, as well as this remarkable work with Axis Dance Troupe. SoVoSó has appeared at major festivals and venues, from the renowned Monterey Jazz Festival to New York's Bottom Line, Yehudi Menuhin's Canto del Mondo Festival in Hamburg, Germany and The Webby Awards. Their CD SoVoSó: World Jazz A Cappella was awarded "Best Studio Album" by the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards, with their second CD Truth and Other Stories receiving a 1999 "Best Jazz Album" CARA nomination. The world-flavored pop-soul-jazz CD Bridges, a 2001 release, is described as "supreme artistry" by Wired magazine. http://www.sovoso.com/
June Watanabe, (Choreographer/Dancer/Artistic/Director) of June Watanabe in Company since 1982, and Professor of Dance, has been at Mills College part-time for over twenty years. She has received a B.S. University of California at Los Angeles in 1960. She has been a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, California and Marin Arts Councils, commissions and residencies from the American Dance Festival, Jacobs Pillow, and grants from numerous local, national and international organizations. A recipient of the 1992 Isadora Duncan Dance Awards for individual performance and special award in 1991 with Frank Shawl and Marnie Thomas, she is recognized for one-of-a-kind collaborative evenings with distinguished artists. She has improvised with David Rosenboom, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, and jazz artrist, Denny Zeitlin, and has worked with composers/musicians Kronos Quartet, Bun-Ching Lam, Judith Rosenberg, Carl Stone, Kirsten Vogelsang, and visual/theatre artists Ruth Asawa, Jose Maria Francos, Douglas Rosenberg, John Woodall, and Sandra Woodall. Profiled for PBS,"The Creative Mind" in 1991, she has also served on the Board of Trustees of DANCE/USA and as consultant/panelist for arts organizations nationally. All her work in improvisation, performance, choreography and teaching is based on a core focus of the cellular, dealing with the spatial dynamics of time.
Katrina Wreede (Violist/Composer/Teacher) has been credited by jazz historian, Leonard Feather, with making the "only outstanding contribution to jazz on the [viola]." An eclectic and untraditional violist, she appears regularly with ensembles ranging from symphonies and new music groups to jazz, avant garde tango, experimental big band and gamelan as well as participating in performances of social and political relevance. As a past member of the Turtle Island String Quartet, she toured in 41 states and on three continents and has also been soloist for the world premieres of two viola concertos and many other works. Her biography is listed in Maurice Riley's "The History of the Viola, Vol. 2". Wreede's music has received many awards and grants including: Meet the Composer, the Gaudeamus Foundation, the Morton Gould Composers' Competition, multiple awards from the Composer's Guild Competition, the American Music Center, the Creative Works Fund to collaborate on "Women in Black" with KITKA, and for the last five years, an on-going grant from the American Composers Forum. Recent commissions include: four works for the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, five for the American Composers Forum, the Berkeley Youth Orchestra - an audience interactive fanfare, the Tassajara Symphony, Community Women's Orchestra, ECHO Dance Project, music for silent films for both New Music Works and the Sprocket Ensemble with Pacific Film Archives. She has been Artist in Residence with the Berkeley Symphony, creating their "junior composer program", Boston Conservatory, Berkley School of Music, the American Composers Forum, the Clairbourn School, and many others. Many of her compositions are distributed internationally by MMB Music and Latham Music. Her "Living Wind Chimes" project, audience-interactive, giant brass pipes in unusual venues, has presented concerts in botanical gardens, the Oakland Federal Building, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Golden State Bonsai garden, the Mendocino Headlands, schools and rest homes and even a Columbarium. http://www.katrinawreede.com/
Kate Weare (Choreographer) is a young choreographer recently described by John Rockwell of The New York Times as helping to define the next generation of dance makers. Weare is the recipient of residency awards from The Joyce Foundation, NY, The Djerassi Resident Artists Program, CA, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, MA, The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, FL, Dance New Amsterdam, NY, and has twice been commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop, NY. Kate Weare Company won NY’s 2007 A.W.A.R.D. Show! (a competition in which the audience chooses the best modern dance) and Ms. Weare was recently nominated for a 2008 Alpert Award in the Arts in Dance. Weare earned her BFA in 1994 from CalArts and maintains a bi-costal presence, showing work annually in New York and San Francisco. For info about Kate Weare Company: www.kateweare.com