“BIODANCE at Home” goes international! Tickets are FREE but includes a $2.70 AUD (equal to about $2.09 USD) processing fee to support the Adelaide Fringe.
To reserve:
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/…/biodance-at-home… Choose any day between February 19 and March 6 to view the performance. Ticket holders will have 48 hours from the date selected to utilize the link to the show.
EDIT March 6, 2021: Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to make a difficult financial choice to end our participation in Adelaide Fringe a bit early. We are grateful to have brought our work to this amazing venue. If you were hoping to see it or have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]! We are happy to share our work directly with you.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 8, 2021
MEDIA CONTACT: Missy Pfohl Smith
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 585-201-1002
www.biodance.org
“BIODANCE at Home” Adelaide Fringe 2021Choreographer/director Missy Pfohl Smith, media artist W. Michelle Harris and poet Lauren K. Alleyne collaborate to bring virtual BIODANCE show to Australian Fringe.
ROCHESTER, NY— The artistic duo that has brought sold-out shows to the Rochester Fringe Festival year after year is going international! This past September, BIODANCE choreographer/artistic director Missy Pfohl Smith, media artist W. Michelle Harris, and poet Lauren K. Alleyne of Trinidad and Tobago, premiered an onscreen dance for the 2020 KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival. Success in Rochester inspired BIODANCE to bring the show to the international (virtual) stage through the 2021 annual Adelaide Fringe Festival. This virtual show will run daily from February 19 until March 28 accommodating audiences in all hemispheres. As in the Rochester premier, the presentation will include an excerpt from the stunning and renowned 2018 Fringe hit Aria, as well as an earlier BIODANCE short film Thou Hast Trespast (2010), a zany outdoor adventure featuring some of the original company members. Current BIODANCE member Natalia Lisina also contributes an original dance short entitled Lullaby.
The featured work “Pilgrimage” was created in 2020 during the pandemic, filmed on-location in a forgotten sculpture forest (exact location undisclosed), and inspired by the heart-jabbing poetry of Lauren K. Alleyne. In 2006, Alleyne and Pfohl Smith first began experimenting with joining poetry and dance through an interdisciplinary workshop. “Since we first met, Lauren has gone on to publish award winning collections of her activist poetry that cuts right through you as a reader and witness to injustice” shares Pfohl Smith. “Bringing this art and performance to homes throughout the world is an honor, and one bit of silver lining in this worldwide pandemic.” Alleyne’s voiceover of her poem Red Pilgrimage provides a soundscape for this work that thoughtfully grieves and beautifully hopes for a world where we can exist together in harmony without hate, without violence, and without fear.
BIODANCE is known for its innovative multi-media performances, notably those in collaboration with media artist W. Michelle Harris. Creating three distinct evening length works designed for Rochester Museum and Science Center’s 4-story Strasenburgh Planetarium, BIODANCE now ventures into the virtual realm of art-making for the first time, keeping its dancers and multi-disciplinary artists in the creative process, and broadening its reach to homes all over the world. Although 2020 presented an unprecedented challenge for the performing arts, BIODANCE has always welcomed experimental forms of art and is thrilled to be part of the Adelaide Fringe.
Tickets are FREE plus a $2.70 AUD ($2.09 USD) processing fee that supports the Adelaide Fringe and can be reserved ed at https://adelaidefringe.com.au/…/biodance-at-home…. Choose any day between February 19th and March 28th to view the performance. Ticket Holders will have 48 hours from the date and time selected to utilize the link to the show. BIODANCE gratefully accepts donations through a link provided and invites comments and questions for the artists, who will respond on our Facebook and Instagram pages.
Website: www.biodance.org
Phone: (585) 201-1002
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BIODANCE1/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/biodance1/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/biodance
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/BIODANCEChannel
NOTE TO MEDIA: Interviews and photos are available upon request.
BIODANCE is a non-profit contemporary dance company founded in 2002 that collaborates with multi-disciplinary artists and is the only true repertory company in Rochester, performing work by a roster of recognized choreographers including Missy Pfohl Smith, Bill Evans, Randy James, Ivy Baldwin, Heidi Latsky, Jeanne Schickler Compisi, D. Chase Angier, Laura Regna and Courtney World. BIODANCE explores social, political, and environmental issues through its works and has sold out numerous shows at the Rochester Fringe Festival. BIODANCE interacts with and outreaches to its community members and across the country in a variety of ways through performances, workshops, benefit concerts, interactive lecture-demonstrations and classes at venues such as Geva’s Nextstage, Hochstein Concert Hall, the Strasenburgh Planetarium, MUCCC and more. Over the past ten years, BIODANCE has been providing free dance and movement workshops to the Senior Center at Community Place of Greater Rochester. Recent collaborators have included the musical artists of Sound ExChange, digital media artist W. Michelle Harris, visual artist Allen C. Topolski, and the leading choral/orchestral ensemble Rochester Oratorio Society. City News chose BIODANCE two years in a row for a Best of Fringe Award in the Rochester Fringe Festival. Missy earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her BS from SUNY Brockport. She has recently developed various new courses including one called Choreographic Voice: Dance and Social Justice in the UR Program of Dance. She has received various grants from The New York State Council on the Arts and the New York State Legislature, administered by the Arts and Cultural Council of Greater Rochester and Livingston Arts, a member supported organization. Smith and/or BIODANCE have also received support from The Max and Marian Farash Foundation, the Rochester Community Foundation, Hobart and William Smith Colleges’ Center for Teaching and Learning, among others. www.biodance.org
Missy Pfohl Smith (Artistic Director/Choreographer, performer and collaborative artist) directs the Institute for the Performing Arts and the Program of Dance and Movement at University of Rochester and is artistic director for the contemporary repertory company, BIODANCE, based in Rochester, NY. Her work has continually sold out shows at Rochester Fringe, having been called “Gorgeous…astonishing…exceptional” and “a brilliantly crafted world of beauty, melody and calmness” by Rochester City News. Smith enjoys collaborating with multi-disciplinary artists in music, visual art, sculpture, film and technology. She was selected for City News’ “The Rochester 10: Rochesterians doing great things behind the scenes” in 2015. BIODANCE’s Anomaly, in collaboration with Sound ExChange and media artist W. Michelle Harris at the Strasenburgh Planetarium, won a 2013 Best of Fringe Festival award for Best Use of Venue and enjoyed another sold-out run in 2016. To follow up, Smith and Harris co-conceived a new work for the Planetarium in 2017 titled Labyrinth, which sold out 4 shows, and another in 2019 titled The Fragile Corridor, playing to thousands of audience members and critical acclaim. Her choreography, performance and teaching has spanned across the US and internationally, most recently in Berlin, Greece, Finland and Scotland. Smith also made her debut at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2017 with collaborator and violist Bridget Kinneary to sold out houses. She is certified in Bill Evans Laban/Bartenieff-based pedagogy and also teaches choreography, dance on camera and contemporary dance and social justice. Before returning to Rochester in 2004, Smith was based in NYC for 12 years and performed and taught internationally with Randy James Dance Works and Paul Mosley, as well as apprenticing for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company.
W. Michelle Harris (Media Artist) is an associate professor teaching New Media Interactive Development at Rochester Institute of Technology. She is also a member of Rochester’s WOC Art Collaborative. Her video installation work (solo and collaborative) has been shown at such diverse venues as the ACM SIGGRAPH, World Maker Faire, and INST-INT, as well as regional venues such as Gallery 74, the Baobab Cultural Center, Community Folk Art Center, Schwienfurth Memorial, and Squeaky Wheel. She has done live-mixed visuals for performances in collaboration with Juanita Suarez, fivebyfive, Dave Rivello, Reenah Golden, Sound ExChange orchestra, and most prolifically, BIODANCE. Michelle has been an ongoing collaborator with Missy Pfohl Smith and BIODANCE since 2013. She received her BS from Carnegie Mellon University, and a MPS from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (where she had the honor of interning with Troika Ranch).
Lauren K. Alleyne (poet) hails from the twin island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Interviewing the Caribbean, Crab Orchard Review, among many others. She is author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish (New Issues (US) & Peepal Tree (UK), 2019). Her work has been awarded many honors, most recently, the Phillip Freund Alumni Prize for Excellence in Publishing from Cornell University (2017), the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press (2017), the Split This Rock Poetry Prize (2016), the Picador Guest Professorship in Literature at the University of Leipzig, Germany (2015), and an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship (2014). In 2015, the journal IthacaLit named its annual prize the Lauren K. Alleyne/Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize. Alleyne currently resides in Virginia, USA, where she is an Associate Professor of English at James Madison University, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle.
Natalia Lisina was born in Kazan, Russia. She received her bachelor’s degree in dance at Kazan State University of Culture and the Arts (2004 – 2009). In addition to the American Dance Festival, with a subsequent performance at the Joyce SoHo in New York, Natalia has participated in training workshops and festivals internationally (Paris, Moscow, Vilnius). Natalia continued her dance education at North Karelia College, in Outokumpu, Finland, subsequently spending a year in the United States in an intensive English program. In 2014 Natalia completed the Professional Training Program at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, working with teachers and choreographers such as Johanna Bergfelt, Susanna Hood, Patricia Miner, Sharon B. Moore, Darryl Tracy, and others, receiving the Kathryn Ash Scholarship during her final year. A post-graduation solo was created on her by choreographer Sharon B. Moore. In 2014-2015 she danced as a member of the chamber ballet Panther, in Kazan, Russia, under artistic director Nail Ibragimov. Currently she is working as a dance teacher in the Russian Centre “Sunshine,” is pursuing her MFA at The College at Brockport, and is a member of BIODANCE in Rochester, NY, USA. Natalia first began working with BIODANCE in 2012 during the creation of No Dancing Allowed under the direction of Missy Pfohl Smith. She returned to the company after completing the professional training program at Toronto Dance Theatre in 2014.
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