WIP April 2025

WIP APRIL 2025

Saturday, April 12 at 6pm

In Person at 33 Hawley Street, Northampton, MA in the Workroom Theater

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The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought presents WIP (works-in-progress), a performance series that showcases developing movement-based works on Sunday afternoons. WIP values sharing research and experimentation, rather than presenting finished works, and welcomes applications from emerging and established artists.

The curatorial team choosing WIP choreographers is composed of fellow dance artists located in the Pioneer Valley. We are looking to create performances showcasing a diverse range of established and emerging artists, as well as those local to the valley and beyond.

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Featuring work by:
Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro
Juliet (jules) Paramor
Nancy Hughes
Dani Robbins + Timna Jahoda Kligler
DANCE^2 (Dance Squared)
Abbey Fluet

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Jesse Zaritt's work engages drawing as dancing - a visual and physical practice linked to dreaming, drafting, and materializing futures. His choreographic, performance and teaching practices research the ways in which excessive, contemplative and resistive dance practices change how movement arises in the world and how dancing participates in processes of social transformation. A series of solo works made between 2008 and 2022 interrogate attachments to Jewish ritual and community, seeking to queer dominant paradigms of familial/national belonging, religion, gender and sexuality. Jesse has performed his solo work in Taiwan, Uruguay, Korea, Germany, Japan, Mexico and throughout the United States. He has performed with Shen Wei Dance Arts and in the work of Netta Yerushalmy and Faye Driscoll; he worked as an artistic adviser for Driscoll's projects through April 2023. Jesse is a faculty member of the newly formed Bennington BFA Dance Lab and worked as an Associate Professor at the University of the Arts through the spring of 2024. He currently works in creative dialogue with Sara Shelton Mann.
Pamela Pietro is a dance artist and educator; she received a BFA in Dance from Florida State University and a MFA in Dance with a minor in Biomedical Ethics from the University of Washington. She is Chair and Arts Professor at New York University Tisch School for the Arts, Department of Dance, where she received the prestigious David Payne-Carter Award for Teaching Excellence in 2012/2013. She has directed the Tisch Dance Summer Residency Festival 2014-2021, the Tisch Dance in Berlin Program, and Future Dancers and Dancemakers. She proudly served on the Bessie Awards Search Committee from 2019-2021 and taught for the American Dance Festival (17 years). From 2004 to 2018, Pamela assisted the pioneering neuroanatomist Irene Dowd in teaching anatomy/movement workshops. Pamela has performed professionally with Gerri Houlihan, Anthony Morgan, Michael Foley, RaceDance, bopi’s black sheep/dances, Jennifer Nugent, Monica Bill Barnes, Joanna Kotze and Jesse Zaritt. Most recently, she performed in the work The March at the PAC Theater in New York City and at Carolina Performing Arts in Chapel Hill, NC, collaborating with choreographers Donna Uchizono, Tendayi Kuumba, and Annie B Parson. She has taught and performed her solo work throughout Asia and Europe.
Juliet (Jules) Paramor is a dance and performance artist based in Boston, MA, with deep ties to the Bay Area and Pacific Northwest. Her movement practice is rooted in improvisation, somatic principles, release technique, club dancing, pleasure and discomfort, physiology and energetics, corporeality and magic. She draws from a vast lineage of queer experimental dance artists from the Bay Area and beyond, notably teachers Kathleen Hermesdorf, Gerald Casel, Sara Shelton Mann, and mayfield brooks. Jules curates performance parties, teaches classes, and facilitates contact improvisation jams. Recently, Jules showed work at Movement Research in NYC (October 2024) and received an ARC Seed Residency at CounterPulse (2023). Jules’ creations exist in the space between known and unknown, exploring states of confusion, uncertainty, and nonsense as fertile grounds for creation. Her work is deeply informed by her experiences as a birth worker and sex worker, and is guided by a reverence for the wisdom of the Pussy and the Womb. Juliet's compositions unfold through repetition and observation, often engaging sensual materials and hypnotic music. Her work explores primal belonging, nostalgia, femininity + power, sexuality + sensuality(eros), devotion vs. extraction, and how desire + time exist in the body, and mutually affect one another.
Nancy Hughes, a Buffalo, New York- based choreographer, has had her work presented across the United States, including Colorado,Texas and Washington. Her portfolio includes choreography for local plays and musicals, such as "The Full Monty" and "Stupid $%&*! Bird." Nancy has been awarded grants from NYS DanceForce, the New York State Council for the Arts’ Support for Artists - Choreography Commission and Arts Services Incorporated. In a recent commission from the Self-Advocacy Association of NYS, Nancy crafted a dance piece for movers with disabilities, funded by the Cullen Foundation which debuted at Ujima Company Incorporated Theater in 2003. Nancy was the recipient of the WNY Choreographers’ Initiative and a NYS DanceForce award in 2018. Her commissioned works have been presented by organizations such as the Sportsman’s Americana Music Foundation Festival, Just Buffalo Literary Center, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the University at Buffalo. In addition to her choreographic endeavors, Nancy co-coordinated the Global Underscore for eight years and currently teaches dance at the Lisa Taylor Academy of Ballet. Her performances, hosted in diverse venues including museums, homes, and silos, embody her commitment to bringing movement experiences not only to unconventional spaces but also to different neighborhoods in her city.
Michaela "M" Neild (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, dance educator, creative aging specialist, and arts freelancer. As an independent artist, Neild is engaged with performance art, visual art, collaborative investigation, community-building, seeking liberation through storytelling, and the sharing of space. Neild earned their MFA in Dance and Nonprofit Studies from The Ohio State University and their BFA in Dance Performance & Choreography from SUNY University at Buffalo. While Neild is primarily a dancer, she enjoys infusing her choreography with other visual, video, and installation art mediums. Their choreographic process is experiential, collaborative, and emergent—combining traditional compositional techniques with devising theatre techniques, improvisational games, and chance operation structures. Most often, Michaela enters the creative process by facilitating discussions and experiences that pull a central theme for the creative work out of the people she engages with—viewing the challenges, perspectives, combined talents, cultures, and possibilities that emerge as inspiration.

Dani Robbins and Timna Jahoda Kligler met studying dance at Bennington College a decade ago, where they began a rich mutual friend-torship. Since then, Dani has been based in Downeast Maine where they write and perform original music, produce visual art, and teach dance as adjunct faculty at College of the Atlantic. Dani works in public health and holds a grad certificate in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies from the University of Maine. They are generally interested in Disability Justice, Queer Failure, ocean swimming, and professional wrestling. After completing a graduate degree in Climate Justice at The New School Timna returned to the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains where she grew up. In addition to dancing and making, she teaches dance to children, teens, and adults, and is a freelance writer and researcher. Timna’s interests include environmental justice, trees, cultural criticism, and whales.
Dance Squared is a collaboration of many individuals. Original co-creators are producer/director Jonathan David Martin, computer scientist Huaishu Peng, choreographer/producer, Adriane Fang, and network/interface designer and information scientist, Bill Kules. Dance Squared has been presented at the University of Maryland, the American Dance Festival, and Oregon State university. See https://dancesquared.xyz/ for project details.​
Abbey Fluet is a dance artist from Gardner, MA, currently based in Northampton, MA. She is in her final semester at Smith College, pursuing a B.A. in Dance, where she has performed in works choreographed by Chris Aiken, Sarah Konner, Sarah Lass, Gabriella Carmichael, and Laura David, and in several undergraduate works including her own. Abbey’s take on contemporary dance is informed by improvisation, modern, contact improvisation, and butoh. She is currently researching how quantum theory, in conversation with metaphysical philosophy, can drive movement research in dance improvisation. Abbey is interested in the decision making processes that improvisation amplifies, and is invested in exercising these processes toward empathy and care. She is curious about what lies between predetermined and undetermined, always searching for improvisation within that which seems “set”, and vice versa. Abbey is also a fiber artist, musician and songwriter, and enjoys intertwining these passions with dance to create multidisciplinary work.

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