EVENT DETAILS
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SIDF 2024 Artists
Inter|National Series - Weekend One
Identity Performing Arts - Chicago
Performance Details :
The company will present two works: Enliven, an east/west fusional dance highlighting energy in motion, and Perpetual, a poetic work revealing our twin angelic and demonic natures.
Company /Choreographer Background:
| Founded in 2021, Identity Performing Arts led by founder and artistic director Ginny Ching-Yin Lo. Ginny had performed her original dance works in China, France and Germany; her company was invited to perform in Hanover, Germany for the Ocean In Between festival. A variety of her works has been nominated for the Chicago Achievement Awards. Most of her works express societal issues with an intent to heal and restore the community. |
Dance Theatre Seattle
Performance Details:
Casta Diva, is a work about prayer, joy, angst, self-pity, rage and peace.
Company /Choreographer Background:
Dance Theatre Seattle (DTS) is a nonprofit dance company based in Seattle that strives to create a safe and inclusive space for dance allowing dancers to hone their true artistic expression. Although in its infancy, DTS has grown remarkably in its first year thanks to grants from Artsfund, 4 Culture, the Paul G Allen Family Foundation, and the Lucky Seven Foundation.
Sumeet Nagdev DanceArts - Mumbai, India
Performance Details:
Jan Jaati delves into the intricacies of caste identity in Indian society. Through movements and expressive choreography, the piece explores the struggles, triumphs, and resilience of individuals navigating the complexities of their caste-based identities through movement.
Company Background:
Sumeet Nagdev Dance Arts (SNDA) founded in 2007 by Artistic director Sumeet Nagdev. SNDA, concurrently runs a School of Performing Arts under Sumeet’s supervision, giving dance education to children, young adults and adults with different modules of Urban Street Dance, Modern & Contemporary Dance, Classical Ballet, Bharat Natyam and many more with experienced guest artists from India and various other countries coming and conducting the same. The company’s expertise is creation of unique Dance Art acts, Theme based Musicals & Exclusive Choreographies to mention a few. The company tours extensively and is also involved with many dance and arts festivals in India.
Khambatta Dance Company - Seattle
Performance Details:
Khambatta Dance Company, presents Cyrus Khambatta’s Dream in the Back of the Head, an intricate and energetic work mixing music and poetry, about the passage of time and valuing how we spend it with choreography reminiscent of the gears of a clock.
Company Background:
Khambatta Dance Company (KDC) was founded by executive artistic director, Cyrus Khambatta, a biracial artist whose father emigrated from India. KDC connects artists and audiences through the exploration of contemporary issues, emotionally resonant performances, and a collaborative process of dance creation. KDC tours annually nationally and internationally at renowned festivals and venues, and intentionally cultivates networks of support with other dance artists through residencies and artist-to-artist collaborations. Since 2006, the Seattle International Dance Festival, KDC’s signature program, unifies communities and celebrates the city’s neighborhoods by showcasing the work of local, regional, national and international dance artists who exemplify the diversity of contemporary dance.
Project Convergence - NYC/Seattle
Performance Details:
Taalam (Rhythm) is a love letter from Bharatanatyam, a percussive form of Indian classical dance, to tap dance, in the language of rhythm.
Company Background:
Project Convergence is home to the union of Bharatanatyam and American tap dance. Lauded by both the New York Times and The Hindu, the Project Convergence presents an experience simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar to audiences by uniting two seemingly different cultures in the universal language of rhythm. The company has been featured in The Guardian, WNYC (New York Public Radio), and The Dance Enthusiast. They’ve appeared across the United States, including at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre for the Erasing Borders Dance Festival, Lincoln Center for their 2018 Out of Doors Series, and the Houston Texan’s NRG Stadium. Excerpts of their show “Taalam (Rhythm)” have played to a sold out 5,000 person audience at Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center and the Citigroup Theatre at Alvin Ailey.
Spotlight on Seattle
Ashley Menestrina - Seattle
Performance Details:
Combative Echoes asks us, “on the occasion of unforeseen collisions, what does it look like for one to re-encounter a lived experience that’s been unknowingly shared?”
Company Background:
| Ashley Menestrina is a Seattle based artist that has been performing solo works since 2015. As a mere conduit for human exchange, her goal as a choreographer and performer is to effectively explore and showcase effort, as it relates to the human condition. |
Beth Twigs - Seattle
Performance Details:
The Psychosomatic Experiences of Obligation: A Study, is based on Beth’s current research on gender-based violence within ballet partnership and also explores themes such as consent, power, and desire.
Company Background:
Beth Twigs (she/her) grew up in Santa Cruz, California where she spent her early childhood years creating worlds, theatrical performances, and dance extravaganzas. At a young age she was introduced to ballet and immediately fell in love. After spending ten years with Ballet Austin in Texas, freelancing in San Francisco, and choreographing in London, she moved to Seattle where she has been passionately exploring, generating, and supporting dance works through her company, The Gray. Beth is incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to dive even deeper into her curiosities through the generous support of The University of Washington’s Dance Department’s MFA program where she will be graduating from in the Spring of 2024.
BKirk Dance - Seattle
Performance Details:
Becoming One With the Stucco is an exploration of defensive, emotional walls and how to breach the hesitation we often feel in order to accept support.
Company Background:
BKirk Dance has been the recipient of three grants in the last year. They approach choreography through a lens of accessibility. This means movement accessibility for performers in allowing their bodies to move in ways that are safe for them, but also accessibility to audiences of creating an inviting, personal space for new viewers to feel welcome without a sense of intimidation that dance can sometimes be fraught with for the non-dancer.
Ethan Pak Rome Movement - Seattle
Performance Details:
The Fell Tree Whispers Beyond the Forest explores what is carried within us beyond the seen. Can the vicissitudes ingrained in our bones be reforged?
Company Background:
Ethan Pak Rome is a Korean and Norwegian choreographer based in Seattle. He has trained at Jacob’s Pillow and danced for the Khambatta Dance Company, Seattle opera, and choreographed for KDC, Price Arts N.E.W., Intrepidus, Bridge Project, BOOST, Western Washington University, Gonzaga University, and co-founded Forthun+Rome Dance Theater and the Trillium Dance Collective.
Leah + Rhea - Seattle
Performance Details:
Carried by James Blackshaw’s finger-picked guitar as if driven by the force of time, Interwoven is an intricate duet exploring how we share growth and life lessons through different experiences.
Company Background:
Leah Russell and Rhea Keller are two well-established dance artists in the Seattle area. Leah has presented solo work at the Seattle International Dance Festival, Long Shorts, and 12 Minutes Max. Rhea’s work has been featured at the Rhode Island Women’s Choreography Project, Sunset Hill Walking Arts Fair, and Fuselage Dance Film Festival. Interwoven is their first work created in collaboration.
James Ray Residency - Program A
Margaux Gex - Seattle
Performance Details:
The time in between looks at how momentum sets off a series of happenings and how we individually and collectively react to it.
Company Background:
Margaux Gex, originally from Switzerland, moved to Seattle in 2018 to attend Cornish College of the Arts, from which she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2021. Margaux is a freelance choreographer, producer, teacher, curator, and performer, who is currently dancing with MALACARNE/ Alice Gosti. She has co-produced two evening length dance performances, Duality in 2023, and Catalyst in 2024. Margaux has choreographed for BOOST Dance Festival, PROPEL, Full Tilt, and has performed in The Bridge Project, Artists at the Center, and Dance THIS.
Maia Melene D’urfé - Seattle
Performance Details:
this is the time, and this is the record of the time is a quartet investigating fracture and how we respond to shattering, exploring the impulses to fix, hide, fight, or sit with the pieces. We wrestle with this in tension and in care somewhere between erosion and reconstruction – in the fear of unraveling, we speak loudly from below.
Company Background:
Maia Melene D’urfé is a dancer and choreographer in the contemporary, house, and breaking communities of Seattle. They choreograph, dance, create costumes, produce and curate performances, working with dancers, musicians and mixed media artists to create worlds of movement that are full of visceral texture, abstract thought, and vivid musicality. This year, they are an Artist in Residence for PROPEL and James Ray Residency, and are honored to be selected to present their work at Seattle International Dance Festival, Estrogenius Festival NYC, and FIDCDMX in Mexico City. Through their dancing, choreography, and curation, Maia works on exploring abstract and personal thoughts through movement, and works to meld their experience with street styles, contemporary dance and live music to create something intricate and visceral.
James Ray Residency - Program B
AnA Collaborations - Seattle/NYC
Performance Details:
Now I Hold You Close is about a woman suffering from night terrors who uncovers layers of dissociation in a final effort to awaken wholeness.
Company Background:
AnA Co-Founders, Audrey Rachelle (Former cast of Sleep No More) and Alex Oliva (Original cast of The Lost Supper) have created over 25 dance works since 2015 including two award-winning films. AnA’s recent projects have been supported by The Warhol Foundation, Shoreline Public Art, 4Culture, Mini Mart City Park, and NW Film Forum. They have been featured on MoTV alongside Grammy-award winning saxophonist, Johnny Butler and are recipients of the Gibney Dance Digital Tech Initiative.
Vania Bynum Dance - Seattle
Performance Details:
As of now, untitled.
Company Background:
Vania Clemons Bynum, founder of VC Bynum Arts & Education, is a former computer engineer who utilizes the ingenuity of making software to create dance. A graduate of Cornish College of the Arts, Vania has taught and choreographed throughout the Greater Seattle area. She has performed in the Paramount & Moore Theaters, Intiman Theatre, Benaroya Hall, the Meydenbauer and more. Utilizing dance as her form of worship, Vania directed the Adult Liturgical Dance Ministry at New Beginnings Christian Fellowship for 11 years. She also performed in The Black Nativity, Hip-Hop Back to Its Roots!, Dance This!, 7 Women 7 Stools, and American Jazz Nutcracker.
Inter|National Series - Weekend Two
Luminski Dance Project - Katowice, Poland
Performance Details:
The company will present two works. Ashes of a dead frog (2006) is a work created for the NYC-based Nai Ni Chen Dance Company revived as a tribute for its visionary founder. The frog is symbolic of deep truth, transformation and change as well as purification and renewal.
What I Have Not Seen Before concerns resilience/resistance to adversity, and perseverance, surrounding various issues of identity, ecology population, community, and cultural change.
Company Background:
Luminski Dance Project has been extensively involved in international projects in India, China, and the USA. In addition, the group organizes the Art Spaces Project in Katowice, Poland, which is financed by Ministry of Culture and National Heritage through the National Institute of Music and Dance. In addition to creating performances, the company creates many educational and social projects with children, teenagers and adults.
Karin Stevens Dance - Seattle
Performance Details:
Just Love is a contemporary dance that explores friendship, the communal and loving presence.
Company Background:
Founded in 2009, Seattle-based Karin Stevens Dance has created and produced over twenty-five dance performance projects––including multidisciplinary works and dance-activism community events––and toured inter/nationally. KSD captures the breadth of the moving human experience through diverse performance works from the purely musical, to the theatrical, to the environmentally focused. Collaborating with award-winning music, theater and visual artists, KSD investigates the complex layers of our cultural spaces, time, and relationship to Earth and the spiritual. KSD creates space for building connections, believing that dance is a radical, vital art key to our future in this 21st century. Striving to make beauty out of the human transformational process, KSD celebrates the power of movement to help us evolve and connect more deeply to ourselves, each other and to the inner/outer landscapes of our interdependent existence.
Choomna Dance Company - Seoul, South Korea
Performance Details:
Performers from the lowest social class in Joseon dynasty, the Namsadang troupe used to sing and dance in the street from village to village under the permission of Yangban, the high-class people of that dynasty. Gom-bang-yi-teot-da, the title of this work, has been their jocular jargon meaning “allowed to perform.” Bounded by status yet not succumbing to their fate, the Namsadang lightheartedly expressed their sorrow and joy. “
Company Background:
Choomna is the Korean abbreviation of ‘Choom-chu-neun Na-moo’, which means ‘Dancing Tree’. It contains the intention to dance like a tree, deeply rooted with gravity. In this spirit, we have pursued movement with somatics based on awareness of the body, Baguazhang, and martial arts. The company has been selected for PAMS Choice Seoul Art Market, Busan International Dance Market (BIDAM), Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF), Seoul International Dance Festival In Tank (SIDFIT), Seoul Improvisation Dance Festival (SIMPRO) and many others. Outside of Korea, it has performed in the Seine-Saint-Denis Festival (France), AURA Festival (Lithuania), Dance Exchange (Hong Kong), ZAWIROWANIA Festival (Poland), UEREP Festival (Slovenia), Stray Birds Dance Platform (Taiwan) and others.
The company works internationally on an ongoing basis, including a long-term collaboration with the South Chicago Dance Theater for the last five years.
CarliAnn Forthun Bruner - Spokane, WA
Performance Details:
Let me tell you a story… explores concepts centered around the complex layers of being comfortable within one’s skin in different contexts and in spaces that are not able to accommodate the fullness of our individuality.
Company Background:
CarliAnn Forthun Bruner received her BFA in dance from Simon Fraser University in 2012 and her MFA in dance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2021. CarliAnn is of mixed European and Indigenous descent (Colville and Shuswap). Since receiving her formal education, she has been on a journey to more fully understand her Indigenous heritage, using dance and embodiment to reclaim ways of knowing the world that were once taken from her ancestors. She often collaborates with artists of other disciplines, creating dance for film, theater, galleries, and performance. At the root, CarliAnn’s work is a physical investigation of relationships to nature, human beings, and spirit, and stories from the past and the imagined future. Bruner is a recipient of the Artist Trust GAP grant and Artist Trust Fellowship with collaborator James Pakootas (Colville), as well as the James Ray Residency from Seattle International Dance Festival.
Emily Schoen Branch - Seattle
Performance Details:
Inspired by an indigenous origin story, Skywoman evokes a dawn of living beings. An ethereal spaciousness lays the bedrock for momentum and vitality.
Company Background:
Emily Schoen Branch is a Seattle-based dance artist, choreographer and teacher. Dance Magazine named her “Top 25 to Watch” and Baryshnikov Arts Center named her “Martha Duffy Resident Artist” for their acclaimed BAC Space residency. Emily makes dances for stage, film, and breweries, including a happy hour performance series and an international collaboration with dancers from Tunisia, which was supported by the US State Department and Dance Motion USA. She has fulfilled 20 choreographic commissions for companies and universities around the country. Emily danced for Kyle Abraham/AIM; the Metropolitan Opera in works by Doug Varone, Mark Morris and Carolyn Choa; and for 8 years with Larry Keigwin / KEIGWIN + COMPANY; and is currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at the University of Washington.
Spectrum Dance Theatre - Seattle
Performance Details:
TWILIGHT is an abstract contemporary dance work.
Company Background:
Spectrum Dance Theater (SDT) was founded in 1982 to bring dance of the highest merit to a diverse audience composed of people from different social, cultural, ethnic and economic backgrounds in Seattle, WA. Under Donald Byrd’s visionary artistic leadership since 2002, the organization has embarked on an exhilarating transformation that has attracted world-class dancers, produced some of the most ambitious works in contemporary dance, and generated local and national praise.
slowdanger - Pittsburgh
Performance Details:
Resonant Body is a duet performance and extended research based project between slowdanger’s co-artistic directors taylor knight and anna thompson, that re-examines ocularcentrism in dance performance via tactile response, sound memory, physical impact and psychoacoustics.
Company Background:
slowdanger is a Pittsburgh based, multidisciplinary performance entity founded by co-artistic directors taylor knight and anna thompson. Since 2013, the group has resourced choreographic, improvisational and contemporary dance/performance frameworks to create work at the intersection of movement, sound, technology, physiological centering and ontological examination. slowdanger uses performance and collaboration as practice to delve into cyclical life patterning such as effort, transformation, and death. Its work largely centers the body, researching its relationship to others, systemic societal structures, the environment, sensory information, technology and the unknown/unknowable. It has been featured in/by Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” (2018), MoMA, The Kennedy Center, The Warhol Museum, Usine C, Park Ave Armory and more. It is a 2022 awardees of the NPN Creation Fund and NEFA/National Dance Project to create our work, SUPERCELL which premiered in fall 2023/Spring 2024 at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, the Flea NYC, and Velocity Dance Center Seattle.
BK Dance Project - NYC
Performance Details:
Touchable dream asks: is it possible that your dream ever becomes a reality? Answer: Yes, it is. If you desire the dream with passion, challenge, patience, faith as well as will.
Company Background:
Bo Kyung Lee has presented her works-in the Unites States in New York, Seattle, Chicago, Washington DC, New Jersey, and in Europe in Bulgaria, France, Finland, as well as in Asia in Korea, and Japan. She has received many awards and reviews as a soloist contemporary dancer and a choreographer from internationally acclaimed festivals and taught workshops at Rutgers University, Ithaca College, Queens Museum, Youth Center in Burgas, etc. Now she is a faculty member at the Peridance Center in New York.
Alana O. Rogers Dance Company - Seattle
Performance Details:
The Deep Dark tumbles its audience into a world of fantasy and dreams, creating its own, formidable epic.
Company Background:
Alana O. Rogers Dance Company (Seattle, WA) presents dynamic, theatrical dance works that investigate stories and abstractions of human nature and experience. It is the mission of Alana O. Rogers Dance Company to present art that invites, absorbs, and gives with honesty and without hesitation. Rogers’s choreography is lush, full-bodied, and highlighted with fearless athleticism, crisp technique, and a poignant and quirky emotional sensibility. She believes in the power of art to leave etchings on our collective experience that remain after the viewing has past. Her work has been commissioned by many festivals and programs in the Pacific Northwest including ChopShop Bodies of Work, the Seattle International Dance Festival (SIDF), YAW Theater, the BOOST Dance Festival, Velocity Dance Center (NextFest NW, Fall Kick Off, Access Velocity), and On the Boards (12MM & Open Studio), among others. Alana is a 2020/2022 awardee of the James Ray Residency through the Raynier Foundation, a recipient of a GAP Grant from Artist Trust (2016), two smART Ventures grants from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture (2014, 2022), and a Creative Residency at Velocity Dance Center (2014).
Note: All ticket sales are final. There are no refunds for “no-shows.” Tickets may be exchanged for alternate dates with 72 hours’ notice prior to the new date desired. Unused or partially used passes are non-refundable in whole or in part and may not be converted to single tickets. As indicated on the ticket sales page, fest pass holders must reserve a seat for each show desired using the provided 16-digit code for all seats and shows desired. If you require assistance, please contact us.