MOVERS & SHAPERS: A DANCE PODCAST

The personal stories, experiences, and ideas from those who shape the dance field.

“I love Movers and Shapers: it focuses my mind on the important things in life: I love the care with which it’s choreographed(!).” Review, Apple Podcasts

“This podcast sounds so vivid and interesting! I am really grateful to be able to hear all these stories from all of these artists. This podcast is a work of art.” Review, Apple Podcasts

Partnership and Advertising Opportunities: Podcast Media Kit

Home » Podcasts

Movers & Shapers Podcast: Samuel Pott

By Podcast

MOVERS & SHAPERS:

Samuel Pott portrait Tracey LuzPodcast No.21 – Samuel Pott

“Starring New Jersey” Special Podcast Series

Release Date: April 5, 2016

Download Episode on iTunes and Rate Us HERE
Download Episode on Stitcher HERE
Join the Movers and Shapers Facebook Community HERE
Follow on Twitter @ShapersPodcast HERE

 

ABOUT SAMUEL POTT

Samuel Pott founded Nimbus Dance Works in 2005 drawing on a deeply held personal belief in the value that the arts can play in bringing people and communities together. Under his direction the company has grown each year adding performances, new repertory, and new community initiatives and projects. Known for creating structured and musical dances that evoke deep-rooted emotional connection, Mr. Pott’s choreography has been shown in New York City and throughout New Jersey, New England and California at venues including the Joyce Theater and the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. He has collaborated with many esteemed contemporary artists including composers Daniel Bernard Roumain, Samson Young, Judd Greenstein, Aaron Parks and visual artists Nicola Lopez and Trudy Miller.

A member of the New Jersey State Arts Council’s Arts in Education roster of artists, he has taught dance at the elementary, high school, college, and professional levels and has served on the faculty of Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. In 2012 he founded the School of Nimbus Dance Works, grounded in the belief that dance can serve as a meeting point for diverse communities for growth towards common values and goals. The School makes high quality dance training available to youth throughout Jersey City regardless of financial background. Mr. Pott founded and direets NimbusPresents, a Jersey City performance series featuring local and national perfomers. In 2008 Mr. Pott received a Choreography Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was named a Distinguished Teaching Artist by the council in 2012. Mr. Pott was one of 25 arts leaders nationally selected for the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ (APAP) inaugural Leadership Fellows Program. He serves on the board of directors of Dance New Jersey and on the Arts Advisory Council for the Jersey City Board of Education.

Mr. Pott began his dance training at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1999. As a soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company, his repertoire included such iconic roles as the Husbandman in Appalachian Spring, Agamemnon in Clyemnestra, and Adam in Embattled Garden. In addition to working with the Martha Graham Dance Company, Mr. Pott has performed as a lead dancer with many ballet and contemporary companies including American Repertory Ballet, the Oakland Ballet, the Savage Jazz Dance Company. Featured roles are from a wide range of dance styles and choreographers including works by Marius Petipa, Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Isadora Duncan, Twyla Tharp, Lar Lubovitch, and theater directors Robert Wilson and Ann Bogart among many others.

 

MORE ON SAMUEL:

PODCAST INTERVIEW LINKS

Blood Memory: An Autobiography: Martha Graham

UC Berkley

Cunningham Dance Technique

Marnie Thomas

David Wood

Christopher Dolder

Savage Dance Company

Richard Gibson

Martha Graham Center – legal battles

Oakland Ballet

Feldenkrais Method

American Repertory Ballet

Denise Vale

Martha Graham Dance Company

“Dance to Learn”

This special podcast series “Starring NJ” was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.  Special thanks to Charmaine Warren for serving as the Humanities Scholar for this series.

Podcast produced by: The Moving Architects
Interviewer: Erin Carlisle Norton
Intro Music: “Singing Distance” by Elijah Aaron

Movers & Shapers Podcast: Sharron Miller

By Podcast

MOVERS & SHAPERS:SharronM_HeadShot_color

Podcast No.20 – Sharron Miller

“Starring New Jersey” Special Podcast Series

Release Date: March 22, 2016

Download Episode on iTunes and Rate Us HERE
Download Episode on Stitcher HERE
Join the Movers and Shapers Facebook Community HERE
Follow on Twitter @ShapersPodcast HERE

ABOUT SHARRON MILLER

Sharron Miller is Founder/Director of Sharron Miller’s Academy for the Performing Arts (SMAPA), a 501c3 arts education organization whose mission is to provide comprehensive, inclusive developmental training in dance and related theater arts to children, teens, adults and seniors. She is a former Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater soloist and veteran of seven Broadway shows. She has appeared on television, film, and hundreds of radio and television commercials. She is a member of Actors’ Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

Ms. Miller, who attended The Juilliard School, is committed to enriching the lives of young people through the arts. Her early training began with the late Fred Danieli, founder and director of the Garden State Ballet, who taught her the value of self-discipline, self-respect, and a commitment to excellence. Ms. Miller’s educational focus is to foster, nurture and encourage skill building, self-discipline, self-esteem and creativity in every student.

She served on the faculty of The Renaissance Middle School in Montclair, NJ for 13 years where SMAPA provided the dance and drama program for 6th, 7th and 8th grade students during the school day. This program was developed with multi-year leadership support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, praised by the State of New Jersey as an “outstanding arts education model,” and eventually fully-funded by the Montclair Board of Education. Ms. Miller has also served on the faculty of Montclair Kimberley Academy, Far Brook School, and has been affiliated with the New Jersey Performing Arts Center as an arts-in-education consultant/partner. She currently serves on their Community Engagement Advisory Committee.

SMAPA operates year-round in four divisions: Preschool (ages 2-5), Junior (ages 6-11), Prep (ages 12-18) and Adult/Senior. All classes operate on a semester basis (excluding Adult Division) and are developmentally geared based on skill and chronological age. Classes are offered in many disciplines including ballet, modern, jazz, tap, West African, Flamenco, floor barre, Pilates/Yoga, contemporary modern jazz and hip-hop. Children progress from one level to the next when skills requirements have been mastered. There are no recitals but rather parent observations twice a year. SMAPA is not a competition school but rather an arts education organization where the joy of learning is encouraged.

At SMAPA, Ms. Miller (along with a faculty of thirty teaching artists) continues to train hundreds of students yearly, but also continues to develop her arts enrichment programs and community outreach, which includes: Working in partnership with Quitman Street Community School in Newark, NJ, providing a yearlong dance residency for K-8 students; providing an 8-week dance residency over the past five years to 1st through 5th grade students in ten elementary school in East Orange; creating a 6-week full-day arts program, “Prime Time Summer Arts”, for children ages 6-14 in association with the Montclair Department of Recreation and Cultural Affairs (MRCA); and adapting Prime Time Summer Arts to a half-day Preschool Program operating in nine 1-week, theme-based sessions for children ages 3-5.

SMAPA receives generous financial support from foundations including the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Victoria Foundation, the Stone Foundation of New Jersey, the Turrell Fund, Hyde & Watson, Investors Bank, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Newark Arts Council.

Ms. Miller resides in Montclair, New Jersey with her daughter, Jaimie.

MORE ON SHARRON:

PODCAST INTERVIEW LINKS

Misty Copeland

Garden State Ballet

Penny Frank

Joyce Trissler 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Lena Horne 

Donald McKayle

“Don’t Bother Me I Can’t Cope”

Chalvar Monteiro

This special podcast series “Starring NJ” was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.  Special thanks to Charmaine Warren for serving as the Humanities Scholar for this series.

Podcast produced by: The Moving Architects
Interviewer: Erin Carlisle Norton
Intro Music: “Singing Distance” by Elijah Aaron

Movers & Shapers Podcast: Maxine Lyle

By Podcast

MOVERS & SHAPERS:Soul Steps #2Anthony Barboza

Podcast No.19 – MAXINE LYLE

“Starring New Jersey” Special Podcast Series

Release Date: March 8, 2016

Download Episode on iTunes and Rate Us HERE
Download Episode on Stitcher HERE
Join the Movers and Shapers Facebook Community HERE
Follow on Twitter @ShapersPodcast HERE

 

ABOUT MAXINE LYLE

Maxine Lyle has been a choreographer, teaching artist and producer for fifteen years, specializing in African-American step dance. She began stepping at the age of seven in her hometown of Newark, New Jersey and has been performing ever since. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Williams College, where she co-founded Sankofa, the Williams College step team, now in its twentieth season under the Williams College Dance Department. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Theatrical Management and Producing from Columbia University School of the Arts. She has produced several plays and has also directed a youth theatre ensemble in Newark with the All Stars Project of New Jersey. In addition to her theatrical projects, she remains committed to arts education. She developed and implemented one of the first full-time, accredited step dance curriculums in the country, at Harlem Prep Middle School where she taught step for three years. She has also engaged in numerous arts education programming, combining step and other art forms through organizations such as Girls Leadership and The Leadership Program.

ABOUT SOUL STEPS

Soul Steps speaks the language of rhythm.  Founded in 2005 by Maxine Lyle, the company is based in New Jersey and New York and showcases the African-American dance tradition known as “stepping” (not to be confused with Irish step dance!). Their mission is to expand the presence of stepping throughout the world while creating avenues for cultural exchange and awareness among diverse communities. Step started among African-American fraternities and sororities on college campuses as a means of unity and self-expression, and has deep roots in the migrant labor culture of South African gold mines. For close to a century, step dancers have used their bodies as percussive instruments to create a new physical language that inspires, celebrates and forges community. Soul Steps brings this explosive art form to the stage in a high-energy performance that combines percussive movement, hip-hop rhythms, and call and response. Their performances, residencies, and educational programming are suitable for all ages.

Soul Steps brings step everywhere! From school workshops in Brooklyn, to partnerships with U.S. Embassies throughout the world, to Paris Fashion Week, to a cameo in an indie rock band video, they embrace every opportunity to expose diverse communities to the magnetism and dynamic power of step. Credits include a feature in the Diesel Jogg Jeans promotional video, “The A-Z of Dance;” the historical Rick Owens runway show during Paris Fashion Week 2013;  2012 Abok I Ngoma International Dance Festival (U.S. Embassy partnership, Cameroon); Joyce SoHo, Every Little Step, a collaborative piece performed with Dance Theatre of Ireland (New York); Stepping in Remembrance, (U.S. Embassy commissioned September 11th commemorative piece, Dublin); Skena Up International Film and Theater Festival (U.S. Embassy partnership, Kosovo); New York Musical Theatre Festival (2007 and 2011); Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out Series; and a nationally aired MTVU promotional video. Soul Steps was named the 2010 Association for the Promotion of Campus Activities Cultural Artist of the year and was described in the New York Times as giving a performance that “excels in cross rhythms” (November 23, 2011, Joyce SoHo).

MORE ON MAXINE:

PODCAST INTERVIEW LINKS

Step Afrika!

Upward Bound 

Prudential Young Entrepreneur Program

Dance Theater of Ireland

Rick Owens Paris Runway Show

This special podcast series “Starring NJ” was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.  Special thanks to Charmaine Warren for serving as the Humanities Scholar for this series.

Podcast produced by: The Moving Architects
Interviewer: Erin Carlisle Norton
Intro Music: “Singing Distance” by Elijah Aaron

Movers & Shapers Podcast: Jeff Friedman

By Podcast No Comments

MOVERS & SHAPERS:muscle memory
Podcast No.18 – JEFF FRIEDMAN
“Starring New Jersey” Special Podcast Series

Release Date: February 23, 2016

Download Episode on iTunes and Rate Us HERE
Download Episode on Stitcher HERE
Join the Movers and Shapers Facebook Community HERE
Follow on Twitter @ShapersPodcast HERE

 

ABOUT JEFF FRIEDMAN

Jeff Friedman is a dancer, choreographer, dance documentarian and dance studies professor at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He was born in 1956 and grew up surrounded by corn fields in the rural suburbs of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near Doylestown. He began studying classical ballet at Bucks County Ballet with Carl Sandemeyer, a retired New York City Ballet dancer. Jeff graduated from Central Bucks-West High School in 1974 and studied architecture at Cornell University for 3 years, where he began seriously studying contemporary dance before he ran away with a dance company from New York City. After studying on scholarship with choreographer Twyla Tharp and company members in 1978, he then completed his 5-year professional degree in architecture from the University of Oregon in 1979. Jeff immediately moved to San Francisco, California where he joined the Oberlin Dance Collective as their first performing, non-choreographing collective member. Now known as ODC/San Francisco, Jeff performed and toured for 10 years with the company throughout the United States, including Alaska and Hawai’i, and internationally in Australia, at the 1988 World’s Fair; throughout Southeast Asia, on a State Department “soft-diplomacy” tour; and throughout the Soviet Union, in October-November 1989, while the Berlin Wall was coming down in Germany. He also performed in two avant-garde opera productions of Gluck’s Orfeo and Phillip Glass’ Satyagraha at the San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Fe Opera Companies. While based in San Francisco, Jeff also created several performance works, including multi-disciplinarily site-specific performance works, with photographers, videographers and composers as part of his POUNDING THE PAVEMENT site-specific dance festival; group modern dance works; and a solo dance concert created at a Djerassi Foundation Artist Residency that toured the United States as LOCUS Solo Dance, from 1990-1997.

In 1988, Jeff was part of a small group of dance artists responding to their community’s losses due to HIV-AIDS epidemic in the San Francisco Bay Area. Based on training from the Regional Oral History Office at University of California-Berkeley, he created LEGACY, an oral history project that records, collects, and makes accessible the personal and professional histories of Bay Area dance community members who are at-risk, due to their status as elders, to life-threatening illness; and cultural invisibility to the mainstream historical record. LEGACY’s methodology focuses on audio- and video-recorded unstructured oral history interviews in the long-form life-history format. LEGACY’s collection include recordings, edited transcripts, finding and contextual tools, as well as associated collections of personal papers of nearly 100 San Francisco Bay Area dance performers, choreographers, educators, administrators and critics, the largest collection of its kind outside of New York City’s Public Library for the Performing Arts oral history collections. For his pioneering work in dance oral history, Jeff has received the Isadora Duncan, James V. Mink and   awards for his service to the Bay Area dance community, and the oral history communities of the Southwest and Mid-Atlantic regions, respectively.

Based on Jeff’s performance, choreography and oral history careers, he created a new documentary-based dance-text solo work titled Muscle Memory (1992) using excerpts from LEGACY’s collection. While working as dance technique instructor at Sonoma State University, Jeff received a residency fellowship at Columbia College Dance Center in Chicago where he consolidated his interdisciplinary approach to documentary-based choreography. In 1996, he applied to and was accepted by the University of California-Riverside’s doctoral program in Dance History and Theory where he studied the theory, method and practice of oral history; phenomenological philosophy; Futurist photography; and Laban Movement Analysis. These study areas integrated into Jeff’s dissertation titled A Labanalysis of Dancers Life-histories toward Existential Awareness, earning his Ph.D in 2003. Jeff was appointed Assistant Professor at the Dance Department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick the same year.

Jeff’s publications include book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Spain, Germany, where he was a Senior Fulbright Teaching and Research Fellow in Frankfurt in 2010; Korea, and New Zealand, where he was Visiting Lecturer at Auckland University’s Dance Programme in 2007. Jeff has lectured at Stanford, Columbia, Brown Universities, and the University of California-Berkeley, among others in the U.S.; Kent, Bournemouth, Surrey, and Coventry Universities in the UK; Giessen, Leipzig, and the University of Performing Arts in Frankfurt, Germany; University of Warsaw and Charles University, Prague; Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, Israel; Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul, Turkey; and Victoria and Auckland Universities in New Zealand. Jeff teaches oral history training workshops nationally and internationally, including 20 years at the San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design; Texas Woman’s University; Simmons College, as Allen Smith Fellow in 2014; and for the Korea Society for Dance Documentation in Seoul. He is on the editorial board of the Korean Society for Dance Research Journal and Dance Chronicle (US) and was elected to a three-year term on the the Governing Council for the National Oral History Society (2013-2015). Jeff is also commissioned to record oral histories for the School of American Ballet Oral History Project in New York City.

At Rutgers University, Jeff teaches undergraduate dance writing and dance history courses and has taught dance technique, improvisation, performance skills, and dance composition and choreography. He also has taught oral history and performance and the history of interdisciplinary for various honors programs and the new Honors College. In 2014, he was appointed Graduate Director for the incoming MFA in Dance degree, beginning in Winter 2017, where he has developed a curriculum focusing on the interdisciplinary integration of dance theory and practice and critical pedagogy. He will be teaching dance philosophy and aesthetics, the history of interdisciplinarity and special topics courses in dance documentation and reconstruction and oral history and performance. He elected to serve for a three-year term on the Rutgers University Faculty Council (2014-2016) and, in 2014, Jeff also created a Dance and Parkinson’s Program, with free classes in two sites in New Brunswick.

MORE ON JEFF:

PODCAST INTERVIEW LINKS

Bucks County, PA

Joffrey Ballet

Richard Colton

Minnesota Dance Theatre

Harvey Milk

Oberlin Dance Collective (ODC)

Brenda Way, ODC

Erik Hawkins

Margaret Jenkins Dance Company

Legacy Project

Joe Goode

David Gere

Leslie Farlow

San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design

Movement Pattern Analysis – Warren Lamb

Eve Gentry

This special podcast series “Starring NJ” was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

Podcast produced by: The Moving Architects
Interviewer: Erin Carlisle Norton
Intro Music: “Singing Distance” by Elijah Aaron

Movers & Shapers Podcast: Doug Post

By Podcast No Comments

MOVERS & SHAPERS:20120809wDougPost-SamanthaSiegel
Podcast No.17 – DOUG POST
“Starring New Jersey” Special Podcast Series

Release Date: February 9, 2016

Download Episode on iTunes and Rate Us HERE
Download Episode on Stitcher HERE
Join the Movers and Shapers Facebook Community HERE
Follow on Twitter @ShapersPodcast HERE

 

ABOUT DOUG POST

Doug Post began his business career in the printing industry and then switched to the fledgling I.T. industry where he held a number of positions at various companies over a 35 year career. A musician by avocation, he has been involved in the performing arts since childhood.

In 2000, a computer consulting gig landed him in NYC on a daily basis. From this he began attending numerous modern dance performances and developing friendships with performers, choreographers, and others in the industry.

Prior to this, he was involved in his home state of NJ where he served as President of Beyondance, Inc.’s Board of Directors, was a founding member of Freespace Dance’s Board.

By 2005 the computer jobs had all gone overseas and he hadn’t. So a couple of years earlier than planned he began a second career in arts administration.

In 2007, he joined Pentacle, an artist service organization based in Manhattan, and in 2009 became Artist Representative for Pentacle’s Gallery, an eclectic collection of, principally, emerging dance artists.

He has served on the Advisory Board of ACF Dance, and is currently on the Advisory Board of Reverb Dance, the Young Choreographer’s Festival and the Brooklyn Dance Festival. He was Assistant Booking Manager for Eva Dean Dance and assists Wendy Osserman Dance Company as an Administrative Consultant.

He began curating Dixon Place’s Under Exposed performance series in Spring 2011, and then added the Moving Men series in the Fall of 2012. He also publishes a weekly newsletter of performances, auditions and other items of interest to the dance community.

PODCAST INTERVIEW LINKS

José Limon’s “Moor’s Pavane”

Beyondance Inc.

Carolyn Dorfman Dance

County College of Morris

Lisa Grimes

Donna Scro

Freespace Dance

Pentacle

Kyle Abraham

10 Hairy Legs

Akram Khan

Mason Gross School of the Arts

 

This special podcast series “Starring NJ” was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

Podcast produced by: The Moving Architects
Interviewer: Erin Carlisle Norton
Intro Music: “Singing Distance” by Elijah Aaron

Latest Events

Check out the latest upcoming events.

Booking

Get in touch and book The Moving Architects.