MOVERS & SHAPERS: A DANCE PODCAST

MOVERS & SHAPERS:

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:

• Soul Steps Web Page

• Soul Steps Facebook Page

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 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:

• Jeff Friedman, Dance Department, Rutgers University

• MFA in Dance degree, Dance Department, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

• LEGACY Oral History Program, San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design

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 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

MOVERS & SHAPERS: “Starring New Jersey” Series

February 9-April 5, 2016

Download Episodes on iTunes and Rate Us HERE
Download Episodes on Stitcher HERE
Join the Movers & Shapers Facebook Community HERE

Follow on Twitter @ShapersPodcast HERE

The Moving Architects is pleased to announce “Starring New Jersey”, a special 5-part interview podcast series that is an extension of the semi-monthly podcast “Movers & Shapers: A Dance Podcast” hosted by Erin Carlisle Norton.  This special one-on-one interview series focuses specifically on how socio-economic status has played a part in five different individual’s development and career opportunities as “shapers” of the dance field, each of whom call New Jersey home.  Enjoy these five diverse, unique, and inspiring individuals as they tell their stories, share their expertise, and provide insights from their life experiences in New Jersey, NYC, and around the world. 

Doug Post: Gallery Artist Representative and Office Manager at Pentacle and Curator at Dixon Place

Jeff Friedman: Dancer, Choreographer, Scholar, and Associate Professor at Rutgers University

Sharron Miller: Founder/Director of Sharron Miller’s Academy for the Performing Arts, Former Soloist for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Maxine Lyle: Dancer, Choreographer, Teaching Artist, and Producer, specializing in African-American step dance as founder of Soul Steps

Samuel Pott: Founder Nimbus Dance Works and School of Nimbus Dance Works, Former Soloist for Martha Graham Dance Company

This special podcast series “Starring New Jersey” 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 also to Charmaine Warren, who has served as Humanities Scholar for this project.

MOVERS & SHAPERS:
Podcast No.16 – HELEN SIMONEAU

Release Date: January 19, 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 HELEN SIMONEAU

A native of Québec, Canada, HELEN SIMONEAU, has been commissioned by The Juilliard School, the American Dance Festival, the Bessie Schönberg Residency at The Yard, Springboard Danse Montréal, and the Swiss International Coaching Project (SiWiC) in Zurich. She was a resident artist at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Bates Dance Festival and has received fellowships from Bogliasco Foundation and North Carolina Arts Council. Simoneau took first place for choreography at the Internationales Solo-Tranz-Theatre Festival in Stuttgart, Germany in 2009. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally at notable venues such as Dance Place (DC), New York Live Arts, Joyce SoHo (NYC), Tangente (Montréal), The Aoyama Round Theatre (Tokyo), the L.I.G. Art Hall Busan (South Korea), Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out Stage (MA), and Athens International Dance Festival (Greece).

Helen Simoneau Danse, a North Carolina based dance company with strong New York City ties and acclaimed international presence has been described as vibrant, intricate, rich in connection and constantly curious. The company premieres original works by founder Helen Simoneau in collaboration with the dancers. In addition to an annual company season in Winston-Salem, NC, the company has been presented in Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and has toured throughout Germany, Asia, and the United States.

MORE ON HELEN:

• Website

• Facebook

• Twitter

• YouTube

PODCAST INTERVIEW LINKS

Joyce SOHO

DANY Studios

Simonson Technique

Les Ballets Jazz Montréal

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

George Balanchine

Martha Graham

University of North Carolina School of the Arts

Isabelle Van Grimde

Tangante

Lafayette College

Burr Johnson

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