STUDIO STORIES: REMINISCING ON TWIN CITIES DANCE HISTORY

Ayumi Shafer is an educator, choreographer, and mover currently active in the Twin Cities and greater area. Originally from California, Shafer has now been teaching for over 15 years in various cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco (BA, San Francisco State University 2009), Eugene (MFA, University of Oregon 2013), and Minneapolis. As she continues to teach in both public and private institut...

Alexandra is a Carpatho-Rusyn American choreographer based in Minneapolis, MN . She creates original works ranging from solos to evening length group works for the stage and screen. She is a 2021 Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellow at Jacob’s Pillow and a 2020 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow Finalist. Her most recent work, dance film Heritage Sites , premiered in 2020 and will be screened at the...

Rebecca Katz Harwood’s eclectic career has included work as a performer, choreographer, teacher, researcher, and arts administrator. She received her undergraduate degree in Religious Studies and Anthropology from Macalester College, and her MFA in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (NYU Tisch).  Her work as a performer has taken her around the Midwest, to both coasts of the...

Kevin  Kortan has been immersed in sound and movement practices since childhood. He was a boy soprano and later (after his voice changed!) became a cantor in church at a young age, where he first encountered the ancient art of call and response.  A featured soloist in choirs and in musicals, he studied music and theater at Augsburg College.  Singing professionally for a time, fate steered him into...

A native of Dayton, Ohio, Mary Ann Bradley trained at the Dayton Ballet School and performed with Dance Theatre Dayton and Dayton Contemporary Dance II. She graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Dance from Point Park University in 1997. Since moving to the Twin Cities, Mary Ann has performed with numerous companies and choreographers including Dancing People Company, TU Dance, Minnesota Dance The...

SuperGroup is the collaboration of Erin Search-Wells, Sam Johnson, and Jeffrey Wells. They create performance with what is available and what they can make. Their work is deeply invested in multitudinous collaborative processes, rigorous play, and discovering meanings in between. In addition to creating and performing with SuperGroup Jeffrey, Erin, and Sam also have individual art making practices...

John R. Killacky currently serves in the Vermont House of Representatives. Previously he was executive director of Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, program officer for arts and culture at San Francisco Foundation, executive director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and curator of performing arts for Walker Art Center. Other past positions include program officer at Pew Charitable Trusts, g...

Stephanie Fellner’s Minneapolis career now spans 3 decades. She recently said goodbye to her old hips in “Zhauna Franks ‘ SwanSong Studies, a two women show.’ No surprise to anyone, she wore them completely out! They produced many high leg moments and served her well! They will be missed. The new hips had their grand debut this past summer in Berit Ahlgren and Helen Hatch’s production of ‘LDV’! A...

STUART PIMSLER is a choreographer, director, writer, performer, founder and artistic co-director of Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater (SPDT). His work has been honored with Choreography Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and McKnight Foundation and as well as a Major Fellowship and six Individual Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council. Mr. Pimsler has been commissioned by the Gu...

After Carleton College, Lindalee joined Dance Studio Margret Dietz and Choreogram Dance Company in the early 1970s. She also studied with Shirley Mordine, Cathy Ward, Erik Hawkins, Bill T. Jones and Helmut Gottschild. She crafted a practice in dance/movement as a human service in churches, prisons, womens’ shelters, mens’ treatment centers and with absolute beginners from ages 2 to 82. She solo&ap...

Dana K. Kassel (she/her/hers) is currently Program Director for the McKnight Fellowship Programs for Dancers and Choreographers. She brings a wealth of experience to the position with her long history as a performer and a highly skilled and respected administrator.  She served in an administrative capacity for several Twin Cities dance organizations, including Threads Dance Project, Voices of Seph...

A native of Brazil, Marciano Silva dos Santos is recognized by the American Folkloric Society as a “Brazilian artist of unique and exceptional ability and merit.” Silva dos Santos founded Contempo Physical Dance in 2011 and in the same year the StarTribune reported, “Marciano Silva dos Santos is a relatively fresh face in town.  He wasted little time in making his mark.” He quickly gained recognit...

Denise Armstead is an internationally acclaimed dancer, choreographer and teacher. She is currently Artistic Director of D.A. Dance. Ms Armstead has been a dancer for 40 years, 20 of which she spent as a founding member and premiere dancer with Minneapolis-based Zenon Dance Company. She has also been an aerial artist and choreographer with Risa Cohen Aerial Company, flying through the air on Trape...

Wynn Fricke, recipient of seven McKnight Fellowships in Choreography and Performance, produces, according to City Pages, precise and virtuosic work “guided by extremes of physicality. Part of the pleasure of watching it is that the difficult appears effortless; the tiny and delicate, Herculean”.   Wynn danced with Zenon Dance Company from 1992 – 2001 and since 1998 has created eight original works...

Jim Lieberthal has worked creatively in Minneapolis since 1982 : as a dancer, choreographer, actor, writer, producer and now filmmaker. He started this journey originally in music, playing the cello for 11 years. His efforts have also combined work with actors and dancers with alternate abilities, including seated dancers, and dancers utilizing mechanical assists. Work performed included 17 years...

Patrick Scully is a Minneapolis based choreographer/dancer and performance artist. He began dancing in 1972 as a college freshman. In 1976 he co-founded Contactworks, a Minneapolis based dance collective focused on contact improvisation. In 1980 he left Contactworks in search of a way to bring his voice as a gay man into the work he was creating. This eventually led him to Remy Charlip’s Naropa Ea...

Carl Flink is the founder and artistic director of Black Label Movement (Minneapolis, MN) and the Nadine Jette Sween Professor of Dance and Director of Dance at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. Featured in Dance Magazine's January 2014 issue, Flink’s dancemaking is noted for its intense athleticism and physical risk taking, compositional intelligence and humanistic themes as a conte...

Joanie Smith and Danial Shapiro founded Shapiro & Smith Dance in 1987 and developed a collaborative method through which they created their work, taking turns developing material and directing the choreographic process. Danial Shapiro died in the Fall of 2006 and now Joanie Smith serves as sole Choreographer and is honing that process in new ways with the members of Shapiro & Smith Dance....

Megan Mayer (she/her): I am an award-winning Minneapolis-based artist working with choreography, dance, experimental video and photography. I obsess over transposition, minimalism, mimicry, tenderness, wry humor, loneliness, social anxiety, fake bad timing and exacting musicality. By exposing tiny emotional undercurrents concerning the body, I construct a unique perspective of what dance can be: v...

Chris Schlichting lives in the Twin Cities within the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of the Dakota people, and is a Minnesota-based, performer and dance enthusiast who believes in a flexible definition of dance. His choreography expresses itself as a tensile inclusion of dichotomies. Relying on the formality of structural investigation and the emotion of earnest expression, his dan...

Lou Fancher is a freelance choreographer, ballet master and teacher working in the Bay area since 2005. Most recently the Rehearsal Director for Dancing People Company in Ashland, Oregon, Lou for nearly three decades has been the Ballet Master/Rehearsal Director for contemporary dance companies and independent choreographers in the U.S. and Canada. Among the companies are Company C Contemporary Ba...

Dustin Haug  grew up in southern Minnesota and attended St. Olaf College. Although he was very active in the dance department and spent a good deal of time studying chemistry, he earned a BA in Visual Art in 2000. He moved to Seattle, WA after graduation and began working with KT Niehoff’s lingo dance theater in 2002, creating and performing in several evening-length works, including Speak to Me,...

LORI MERCIL is a dancer with the Christopher Watson Dance Company, and MotionArt. Lori began her dance training with Vernon Russell in her native California, eventually earning her BFA in Dance from the University of Montana where she studied with many wonderful guest artists, including Douglas Dunn, and Joe Goode. She earned summer scholarships for further study at the Martha Graham School in NYC...

E.E. Balcos (he, him) is a  Filipino-American and is originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He began formal training with modern dance pioneer Hanya Holm while also engaging in the practice of contact improvisation. A successful performer and choreographer for over 35 years, he danced with numerous independent Minneapolis choreographers including Diane Aldis, Madeline Dean, Mary Easter, Jill Heab...

Helen Hatch is an independent dancer and choreographer based in St. Paul. Named as one of Minnesota Monthly’s “10 Artists to Watch” in 2012, Helen was a member of Minnesota Dance Theatre from 2011-2017, dancing an eclectic range of repertory while also creating her own work. Since then she has worked with various artists in the Twin Cities on projects as a performer, choreographer, and producer. H...