Left: Stephanie Skura in her solo Sacrilege is Needed. Competency is Hell. Woman in orange jeans and red shirt with tasseled waistband, hands splayed and reddish hair akimbo. (Photo: Ian Douglas) Right: Skura's selfie. Woman with slight smile and knitted black-and-red wool hat with knitted red wool flower.
Bessie Award-winning Stephanie Skura is widely noted not only for her long career as a performer, maker, and teacher of post-modern dance but for being a magical catalyst for other artists' creativity. In today's talk, she shares how her imaginative practice, called scores, opens up liberating possibilities. For Skura, dance is a path to consciousness; a method to access the balancing, healing capacity of intuition; a way to play her role in repairing the world.
To listen to today's podcast with Stephanie Skura, click here!
And scroll down for more information!
Wendy Perron, shadow of Juliette Mapp, and Stephanie Skura in Surreptitious Preparations for an Impossible Total Act, directed and scored by Skura. Two women in mid-motion stillnesses against a back wall, their gazes directed in different directions, with shadow of a third person looming large against the wall. (Photo: Anja Hitzenberger)
BIO: Stephanie Skura, ‘major American experimentalist‘ (Patsy Tarr) inaugural 1984 Bessie award-winner, is a choreographer/director/performer/teacher/teacher-trainer/writer. She has performed taught dance performance for over three decades in fifteen countries. With deep respect for individual diversity subconscious realms, she navigates boundaries intersections of dance, poetry and performance, and is passionate about empowering performers. Guided by integration of body/mind/heart, creativity technique, form content, art healing, she is committed to collaboration, multidisciplinary art and lifelong experiment. Recent work integrates radically visceral approaches to language voice. In 2008, she instigated Open Source Forms, a practice and Teacher Certification Program addressing deep commonalities of Skinner Releasing Technique and creative process. Formerly a New Yorker directing a touring dance company, she lives near Seattle where she’s become care-giver for her domestic partner. Having often regarded dance as a last stage before full-on spiritual practice, she now sees it all coalescing as soul-growing pursuits. www.stephanieskura.com
Color headshot wearing red lipstick, gold nose piercing and hair in a flat twist updo with a slight smile. Right hand is placed by the right side of face.
Ballet dancer Daphne Lee, currently with world-renowned Dance Theatre of Harlem, has learned much about the joys and rigors of touring. In this talk, she shares her observations, concerns, and tips for young performers and challenges the dance field to consider how it develops new leaders.
To listen to today's podcast with Daphne Lee, click here!
And scroll down for more information!
Photo: Theik Smith
A black and white shot, of me jumping with feet crossed in the air. Hair is in faux locs and are splayed out from the momentum of the jump. Wearing a nude leotard.
BIO: Daphne Lee, originally from Rahway, NJ, began her dance training at the Rahway Dance Theatre under the direction of her mother, Ms. Jay Skeete-Lee. She graduated with Honors from the Alvin Ailey/Fordham BFA program in dance and currently holds an MFA from Hollins University. As an advocate for Multiple Myeloma Cancer research and diversity inclusion initiatives with companies, Lee remains an active ambassador of negotiating what it means to be an artist in the twenty-first century including branching out beyond ballet. Her teaching and lecture credentials include Rutgers, TCU, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Kent State, and many more. She incorporated a scholarship dedicated to women of color pursuing performing arts degrees. Lee has danced with Alvin Ailey II, Oakland Ballet Company, Collage Dance Collective, Black Iris Project, among many artists including Beyónce and is currently with the Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York City. www.daphnemlee.com and Instagram: Daphne732
The Closest Knot, HKAPA, Hong Kong, 2022 (photo: Ah Liu)
Initially trained in dance in her native Cuba, Judith Sánchez Ruíz has enjoyed an illustrious international career that includes performing for one of the towering figures of post-modern dance, Trisha Brown, who died in 2017. Fans of both Sánchez and Brown rejoiced last year when the Trisha Brown Dance Company named Sánchez as the troupe's first commissioned guest choreographer.
I was honored when Sánchez agreed to take time out from her whirlwind schedule--we're talking about zipping from Hong Kong to Münster to Brooklyn to Switzerland!--to record this wonderful talk for Body and Soul podcast!
To listen to today's podcast with Judith Sánchez Ruíz, click here!
And scroll down for more information!
Rehearsing new work, Let’s talk about bleeding, with the Trisha Brown Dance Company (photo: Julieta Cervantes)
BIO: Judith Sánchez Ruíz, the Berlin–based director (Havana, Cuba) began her dance studies at 11 at the National School of Arts, Ciudad de la Habana, Cuba. Ms. Sanchez has worked with Sasha Waltz & Guests (2011-2014); Deborah Hay (2012); Trisha Brown Dance Company (2006-2009); DD Dorvillier (2002, 2019); David Zambrano (1997), Mal Pelo (1997-1999); and DanzAbierta, (1991-1996). She established the JSR Company in New York City in 2010, creating numerous choreographic stage works and site-specific projects involving live music with innovative composers and visual artists.
Her choreography doesn't rely on the mechanization or memory of movement but more on ramifications and layering of subjects on a radio, a concept used in her last two more significant pieces, ENCAJE (2017) and My Breast on the table (2019). Human casualness and complexity, improvisation, community, and activism are essential to her work.
Sánchez has been awarded grants by The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The American Music Center's Live Music for Dance program, and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Her work has been commissioned at Danspace Project, Works & Process at Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, and Storm King Art Center, NY.
Sánchez has been established as a choreographer and as a teacher at major higher education institutions in dance throughout Europe, the US, Latin America, and Asia. She was a recent artist in residence at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and is currently a guest choreographer of an interdisciplinary opera premiering this January 28 at the Théâtre de Münster, Germany. In addition, she is the first commissioned guest choreographer for Trisha Brown Dance Company and will premiere the original work Let's talk about bleeding at the company's Joyce Theater season, May 2-7, 2023.
As Canadian tap dancer and podcaster Travis Knights recorded this episode, he used a great word to describe one of his beloved colleagues, and I, in turn, will choose the same word to describe Knights's performing--impeccable. I first learned of Travis through another tap artist you've heard on this podcast--Lisa La Touche--and, coincidentally, I later met Travis and shared space with him in a discussion on the state of tap today. And, yeah, maybe there are no coincidences!
I'm never sure how these Body and Soul podcast talks will turn out, but I've come to believe in their emergent magic, all so unique. Learning more about the charming--and very frank--Travis Knights did my heart good, and I hope you'll enjoy his talk, too.
To listen to this Body and Soul episode, click here.
And scroll down to read more about Travis!
Bio: Travis Knights is a Tap Dancer.
Born in Montreal, Canada, Travis was introduced to the rich oral tradition of Tap by his teacher Ethel Bruneau at age 10. He went on to travel the world spreading his love of rhythm across 4 continents, touring with Tap Dogs, Tapestry Dance Company, and the self-produced Tap Love Tour. He is the 2020 recipient of the Jaqueline Lemieux Prize for outstanding contribution to dance in Canada. In December 2021, in partnership with Dance Immersion, Travis, along with renowned Tap Dancer Lisa LaTouche, created and directed Legacy Series: Tap Dance Symposium which aimed to re-introduce Tap Dance to the local Black community in Toronto. In 2022, he debuted Anandam Dancetheatre’s innovative new work, Ephemeral Artifacts, a one person show that to date has toured 4 countries. He is the 2022 Dora Award winner for Outstanding Performance by an Individual. Travis is currently a Slaight Music Artist in Residence at Soulpepper Theatre Company. He currently lives in Brampton, Ontario and hosts The Tap Love Tour Podcast, available on spotify, soundcloud and apple podcasts, (make sure to subscribe) featuring interviews of a myriad of inspiring tap dance artists.
Brinda Guha on stage wearing black and gold with her hair in a top knot and
her arms in the air mid movement. She is smiling, and there are mic
stands behind her.
Official trailer for Can We Dance Here?
I first saw Brinda Guha and her Soles of Duende collaborators--Arielle Rosales and Amanda Castro--perform their sensational Can We Dance Here?
at Dixon Place in 2018, and I've been a fervent fan ever since. Three
women with mad skills in Tap
(Castro), Flamenco (Rosales), and Kathak (Guha), with their juxtaposed and blended dynamism, had the audience roaring with joy. I'm also deeply
respectful of Guha's scholarship and outspoken activism in the arts and social justice. I
knew she would be an powerful speaker for Body and Soul, but little did I know just how powerful!
Come along with Guha through rich memories of family, community, culture, the inner world, and performance.
Brinda standing in a white room on a white platform in all white with
a long shirt with black feminine divine drawings on it. Her hair is
down, and she has a bold lip and large turquoise earrings. Her arms are
in motion, and she is looking directly at the camera.
BIO: Brinda Guha identifies as a non-disabled, caste-privileged, cisgender
and queer South-Asian American, and is a trained Indian Classical Kathak
dancer for over 20 years and has traveled throughout USA and to India,
England, and Spain to perform. During training and performing for years
in the Kathak (Malabika Guha) and Manipuri (Kalavati Devi) dance
disciplines, as well as Flamenco (Carmen de las Cuevas; Dionisia Garcia)
and Contemporary Fusion vocabularies, she co-founded Kalamandir Dance
Company in 2010 based in the vocabulary of #ContemporaryIndian. This
name is currently under review. Through Kalamandir, Brinda choreographed
for many national stages, the North American Bengali Conference at
Madison Square Garden, and self-produced and choreographed original
feature-length dance productions which earned her artist residencies at
Dixon Place (2018) and Dancewave (2019) to continue to develop work.
Now, she is represented by CESD Talent Agency and is pursuing artistic
direction, performance and arts education. She continues to train in
Kathak, Manipuri, Yorchha™ (est. Ananya Chatterjea), and Contemporary.
Brinda also dances with dynamic percussive trio Soles of Duende,
featuring Flamenco (Arielle Rosales), Tap (Amanda Castro), and Kathak.
Her dream of having art meet activism was realized when she created WISE
FRUIT NYC, a seasonal live arts installment (est. 2017) dedicated to the
feminine divine and honoring select women-led organizations. Between
live installments, Wise Fruit NYC functions as a community-led space for
beginner tools in social justice. For her day job, she works as the
Symposium Coordinator for dance service organization based in the values
of justice, equity, and inclusion: Dance/NYC.
