Alex Ketley + Christian Burns

Lecture: September 20, 6pm, Tipton Hall

Workshop: September 20 - 24
"Video, Movement, Improvisation, and the Application of Environment"

During this studio workshop, Alex Ketley and Christian Burns will lead participants in a discovery of how heightened awareness of the environment can reveal depth of personal experience, how video can be used to document creative processes and be incorporated into performance, and how filters and tools can be used during improvisational studies. Work generated by the participants will be explored, discussed, and directed throughout the week. Prior dance experience is not required.

The workshop will reflect processes Ketley and Burns use in their own video-performance group, The Foundry. Created in 1998 with the intention to deeply challenge the process by which their dances, videos, and performances are made, The Foundry focuses on finding relationships between the body and its external environment, as well as a sense of authenticity of experience in performance. Since The Foundry’s inception, the artists have created and presented their performance and video work extensively throughout the United States, Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands. Their performance work was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the top 10 dance events of the year in both 2001 and 2002, and, in 2003, it was dubbed as being “at the vanguard of American dance.” Their choreography won the 2001 Hubbard Street Dance Chicago 2’s National Choreography Competition and was recently selected as one of three finalists for the international 2004 Choreographic Competition of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur in Quebec, Canada. Most recently Ketley and Burns completed a residency at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where they created an evening-length performance and a video installation for the center’s Bay Area Now Festival.