A Thought-Leader In Family & Children’s Dance Classes | Houston, TX
Frame Dance is a thought leader in dance education, inspiring the next generation of movers, makers, and world changers by offering dance classes for adults & children, multi-generational ensembles, professional performances, networking events, and film festivals. We are nestled between West U and the Museum District.
We believe in developing the whole dancer, teaching critical life skills such as creative thinking, leadership, collaboration, and resilience through our artful and playful dance curriculum at our studio and in partner schools.
Our adult modern dance classes are designed to offer you the joy and magic that’s possible when you create space in your life to move, to grow, and to share in the creative process with a like-hearted community.
For more than ten years, Frame Dance has brought radically inclusive and deeply personal contemporary dance to Houston. Led by Founder and Creative Director Lydia Hance, whom Dance Magazine calls “the city’s reigning guru of dance in public places,” the professional company is made up of six acclaimed co-creators committed to collaboration. Frame Dance has created over 50 unique site-specific performances and nine dances for the camera screened in festivals all over the United States and Europe. With an unrelenting drive to make dance in relationship to environment, Frame Dance has created dance works for and with METRO, Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, Houston Parks Board, Plant It Forward Farms, CORE Dance, Rice University, Houston Ballet, 14 Pews, Aurora Picture Show, and the Contemporary Arts Museum. Frame Dance’s productions were described by Arts + Culture Texas Editor-in-Chief Nancy Wozny as “some of the most compelling and entertaining work in Houston.” Creative Director Lydia Hance is a champion of living composers and is dedicated to work exclusively with new music.
Frame Dance Productions presents portions of Mortar, Sylphs Wrote @ Archway Gallery (www.archwaygallery.com), 2305 Dunlavy, 7:30 Saturday, May 21. Free, but donations accepted for the dancers.
You’re invited to experience Frame Dance Productions as they dance surrounded by paintings of donna e perkins’ Caliente: Full Frontal show currently at Archway Gallery . The structural lines for these paintings were drawn from Frame Dance Productions dancers.
Frame Dance Productions Dancers: Jacquelyne Boe, Lauren Cohen, Kristen Frankiewicz, Ashley Horn, Alex Soares, Amber Whiddon
Frame Dance Productions is a dance and technology company directed by Lydia Hance. Her work focuses on collaboration with diverse artists as well as finding connections with technology. www.framedance.org | www.framedance.org/frame | @framedance.
About Lydia Hance
In 2010 Lydia Polhemus Hance founded Frame Dance Productions, a contemporary dance company, to connect Houston’s vibrant art community to the Web 2.0 social networking infrastructure, an emerging, media-rich forum for new creative expression. Her work has been presented at Texas Weekend of Contemporary Dance, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Rice University Dance Film Festival, Houston Fringe Festival, in San Francisco, New York, Virginia and Malaysia. She is the recipient of a Puffin Foundation Grant as well as the Individual Artist Grant from the Houston Arts Alliance. She has a BFA in Dance Performance and BA in English Literature from Southern Methodist University.
yes, very soon. I usually make you all wait for weeks, sometimes months for the debut of a new film. But in keeping with its nature (a short) I figured I would give you a short time to wait. It’s called “There’s a Height Limit” and I think you’ll like it. Stay tuned here, Facebook, and twitter to be the first to see it at www.framedance.org.
May 15 2pm at Barnevelder we perform in the Fieldwork Showcase. You will see brand new dance, fabulous dolls, poems and short stories this year. ALSO, BIG RELEASE of my new short at this event. Can’t wait to show you! I’ve written about Fieldwork on here before. Read further to hear more.
May 21 7:30 pm at Archway Gallery. Our artist collaborator, Donna E. Perkins’ paintings are in exhibit and we are dancing amongst them. Frame dancing among paintings created from Frame Dancers. It doesn’t get more saturated than that. This is a “don’t miss” event.
June 10,11 8pm at Barnevelder we perform in the Big Range Dance Festival. It’s a full bill with lots of exciting choreographers and new work. And they do sell out.
A little more about Fieldwork:
Fieldwork has changed my life as an artist in several ways. First, it has given me structure and accountability. To have a group ready and willing to give feedback on my works-in-progress every week has been a challenge to continue to create new work. While there is never any guilt if I don’t have work to show at a weekly session, I recognize it as a lost opportunity to gain valuable feedback from the artists. It’s a momentum that all artists need.
It has changed my perspective on creating work. Fieldwork has given me permission to linger in the process, and to realize that I’m free to create work even if it doesn’t result in a final product to show publically. It’s exercise, it’s struggle, it’s sinking into creation. For me, art is between 98 and 99.9% process, versus the final product. Showing work that is mid-process has always felt risky. But through Fieldwork I’ve challenged myself to show work in its first stage, when it’s barely begun. While this is very vulnerable, it opens the work to so many more possibilities and freshness outside of my own boundaries. Invaluable. In this way, Fieldwork had allowed me to grow in my perspective of my work and myself. It isn’t about proving myself, but allowing the work to develop— surrendering to the process.
Thirdly, Fieldwork has provided a community of diverse artists. Poets, dollmakers, choreographers, filmmakers, actors, musicians, costume designers… I relish the valuable perspectives of artists outside of my genre. It’s really all about opening ideas and breaking my self-constructed boundaries in the way I approach my work. I’ve come to use their words, reactions, experiences, and perspectives on my work as fuel to grow and take the work in new directions.
I recommend Fieldwork to everyone who considers herself an artist—professional or amateur. We all possess creativity, and it must be nurtured.
The last daytime rehearsal before the show…nights and dress rehearsals from this point on. I have some things to rework, some details to fix and then it’s running and solidifying timing from here on out. We are projecting the entire piece from blu ray. Choreography is set to both music and silence in this work, and it’s easy to tell where you are in a piece of music…but it is not easy in performance to know where you are in silence. So I’m waiting to finalize the film until the silence sections become consistent. They are built into the entire bluray file, I do not plan to stop and start the film mid performance. I can’t stand when the menu comes up–even just that little pause sign in the corner of the screen. So I am challenging myself and the dancers to be consistent in the timing of the silence sections.
That does bring up an interesting concept for me: how we feel and measure time in rehearsal always feels different than in live performance. Adrenaline, additional distractions, costumes, lights all add to the experience which for me distracts from some grounding elements like time. But those are also the things that make the performance special and unique and thrilling.
Don’t forget to reserve tickets…seating is limited. Saturday and Sunday, Hope Center, 7:30 pm. $5.
So you missed the premiere of Satin Stitch? Not to worry because we will screen it in addition to Mortar, Sylphs Wrote at the show on April 16,17. In honor of this, I would like to share with you the words of Frame dancer Kristen Frankiewicz about her experience in Satin Stitch:
Frame Dance Productions….Satin Stitch…
The weekend of the shoot in January seems so long ago now. So much has happened since then. So many more new projects have begun since then…yet I’m still incredibly excited about the energy surrounding the Satin Stitch project. Is it just that I haven’t seen the edited version of the film yet? Or is it something more that’s keeping this project so awake for me? It got me thinking…
Working on this dance film wound up being a single marathon day of shooting, and that day’s resonance with me has happily lasted much longer. When I think back about that cold windy weekend in Galveston, I find that I’m able to recall certain fragments and memories about space, time, direction, feelings, food, laughs, textures, colors, shapes, and images we created, but I can’t remember it all. Obviously I’ll never be able to remember it all exactly as it was. That’s a huge part of the beauty in live performance for me; it’s all a series of beautiful fleeting moments, never to be recreated or remembered exactly the same ever again. Each moment special; each moment temporal; each kept alive in memory by small details or connections, however imperfect their memory may be.
I can’t help with the simplicity of my current thought though, “Hurry up March 12th, I can’t wait to see this film already!”
Thinking back to the film shoot day, I can remember some of the laughs we all shared on the ferry ride over to Bolivar. I can remember the feel of my boots turning on wet sand, the feel of that beautiful cold grey wall, the little warmth and speed of the sun rising for our opening shots, the sharp pain of tall grass stabbing me in the face, a few movements from the zen-like gestural phrase in a diagonal, the freedom felt with improvisation, the warm quality of simple interaction I shared with Ashley, Alex, and Nichelle in the ‘hand dance’ section, and a heck of a lot of tangles in my hair from all that wind! Naturally, I find these memories diluted as I look back on the live performance I gave that weekend, but it doesn’t seem to make the moments any less substantial to me. As much as I love the thrill of performing live, it’s exciting to have opportunity to play with live dance’s counterpoint…film. I’m looking forward to watching film’s take on this project’s live performance.
Ok to be really candid, sure, I really want to see what footage Lydia ends up selecting for the final film version, how it’s edited, what it actually looks like, what the tone of the film feels like, what I look like, what we look like, what music gets used — the details and basics you know. But aside from what it looks and feels like, I really want to see if it reopens more memories of the weekend for me. I want to see if when I watch it a few months from now it’ll feel different yet again. And when I watch it much later than that, I want to see what it feels like then too. Will the film preserve some of my experience of how I felt when I danced in it? Will any of it? Will the images and tone of the film be strong enough to keep the live experience of dancing it more tangible to me? Tangible memories, mmmm 🙂
Houston, Texas (April 16, 17) Frame Dance Productions presents Mortar, Sylphs Wrote on Saturday, April 16 and Sunday, April 17 at 7:30PM at the Hope Center located at 121- West Clay St. #26, 77019. The company comprised of seven dancers will premiere this brand new show integrated with quirky, lush and curious film in high definition. Tickets ($5) are available for reservation; email Lydia.Hance@framedance.org.
Mortar, Sylphs Wrote is made possibly through Hope Stone Inc.’s Hope Werks Residency. The music is by composer Micah Clark, winner of Frame’s 2010 Music Composition Competition. Choreography by Lydia Hance and the company. The new film work is made from footage collected by Director Lydia Hance during her artist residency in Lexington, Virginia called the Rockbridge Artist Exchange.
In 2010 director Lydia Polhemus Hance founded Frame Dance Productions, a contemporary dance company dedicated to creating innovative and vulnerable works for the screen and simulcast stage. Presenting repertory that is diverse, Frame commits to new collaboration with artists of different disciplines to broaden the scope of dance and bring it to a global audience. Frame Dance Productions, familiarly known as “Frame” has performed/screened new works at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Miller Outdoor Theater, Rice Dance Film Festival, Barnevelder, Washington & Lee University, Spacetaker ARC, and Frenetic Theater all in the less than one year of its existence.
Today’s rehearsal was a first. The first time we’ve run (almost) the entire show from the beginning. This Friday we will finish the last section and play a little bit more with the silence section. Then, I believe, we will have the entire Mortar, Sylphs Wrote. I am very excited because we will be using two projectors and two screens for this show. And one of them is brand spanking new. Jonathon, (technology director) and I have been playing with the images, films and LOVING the picture. The colors are vivid and sharp and the luminosity is high. You’re going to love it. Have I mentioned that we will be projecting the film from BluRay? Yes, ladies and gentleman, nothing but the HD best for you.
Today it took us about an hour to walk through/talk through/mark through the show and about 40 minutes to run what we have. And I let the dancers out early. Yes, it happens. Oh…make sure you’re following us on twitter. @framedance.
Hello Fans of dance for camera and dance with camera. You must read this fantastic story by Nancy Wozny. I am so grateful for writers who not only embrace the relationship between dance and technology, but clearly explain why it has and deserves its presence in dance history, dance present, and dance future. Because that’s the thing about technology: it keeps on moving forward. And let’s face it, it’s fun. Read the article here.
