Event Phone: 832-781-0808
Tara Knight, a filmmaker and animator, and Rebecca Salzer, a choreographer and screendance-maker, have co-directed and co-edited four screendance projects since 2013. While to many, collaboration means agreement, Knight and Salzer have found their aesthetic differences to be an advantage and have worked to create collaborative structures that capitalize on them. Knight’s and Salzer’s collaborative films have screened throughout the US as well as in Finland, Brazil, Portugal, Italy, England, Mexico, Greece, and Argentina. In 2015 performers Liz Burritt and Liam Clancy joined Knight and Salzer for a multi-year collaborative exploration of improvisational duet form – both in front of and behind the camera. Join this team for an afternoon of playful exploration as we share some of our processes and discoveries. Bring your smartphone, iPad, or camera, and come dressed to move. No dance experience or film/video-making experience is necessary.
Bios:
Liz Burritt: Liz was an original member of the Joe Goode Performance Group established in 1986, and has been an instrumental collaborator in the making of over thirty original works. While with the Company, she created work and performed all over the United States and beyond, including Canada, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Jordan and Brazil. She is the recipient of a Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Individual Performance. Liz has taught technique, voice, and performance workshops for dancers and actors in Colleges and Universities around the country. She was a faculty member of the Dance Department of Columbia College Chicago from 2005-2015. She recently relocated to Denver, Colorado and taught at Denver School of the Arts. Currently, Liz is maintaining and growing her Bodywork and Massage practice, raising two boys and looking forward to all the creative projects in the future! Thanks to Rebecca Salzer, Tara Knight and Liam Clancy for the opportunity to play a part in developing collaborative relationships and work that challenges and feeds the soul.
Liam Clancy: Immediately after graduating from high school I served three years of active duty in the US Navy as a Signalman and then received a BA in sociology with a minor in dance from Rhode Island College (1990-95). My career began in New York City as a dancer for Elizabeth Streb’s company Ringside in the summer of 1995. Between 1998 and 2002 I was making my own work in New York City, primarily as a solo artist. I was inspired by what I was seeing at spaces like PS 122, Dance Theater Workshop and La Mama. The works I experienced were mixes and collisions of dance, theater, performance art, storytelling, music, vaudeville and cabaret. I identify as a collaborative performance maker, working at the intersections of dance, theater, film and improvisation. I attended graduate school at UCLA in the department of World Arts and Cultures (2002-2005) receiving an MFA in choreography and joined the dance faculty at UC San Diego’s Department of Theatre and Dance in the fall of 2005. I continue to shift my arts practice away from known conventions of performance toward a discipline of inquiry and immediacy that makes discoveries possible and the process of collaboration visible. I am currently in the 3rd year of the Feldenkrais Professional Training Program at the Feldenkrais Institute in San Diego, CA. http://liamclancy.net/
Tara Knight: Tara is an award-winning animator and projection designer. Her recent video projection-for-live-performance include: The Great Wave (Berkeley Rep in Sept 2019), Hollywood! (Craig Noel Award nomination for Outstanding Projection Design) and A Dram of Drummhicit at the La Jolla Playhouse; Amazons and Their Men and Ballast at San Diego’s LGBTQ Diversionary Theater; and The Floating World at the San Diego Art Museum (Emmy Award). Her award-winning short animations and dance films have screened at festivals in New York, Ottawa, Montreal, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Helsinki, London, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Zagreb, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, and most recently at the Annecy International Animation Festival in France.
Rebecca Salzer: Associate Professor of Dance and Director of the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative at The University of Alabama, Rebecca is an intermedia dance artist and educator. Her work for the stage has been seen in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco, where she directed Rebecca Salzer Dance Theater for a decade. Her award-winning films and videos have been programmed in national and international venues and on public affiliate television stations KQED, KPBS, and WTTW. Salzer is a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. She holds a B.A. in Humanities from Yale University and an M.F.A. in Dance Theatre from the University of California, San Diego. Her recent screendance research has focused on how a medium that separates the performer and viewer in space and time can paradoxically preserve and even heighten a sense of immediacy and inclusion. Since 2016, she has also been leading an effort to improve dance’s online presence; pushing for a more cohesive, comprehensive, discoverable, and imaginative approach to representing dance online. In December 2018, Salzer was awarded a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to move this project forward.
