New dance professor to inspire students
By Emily Timmerman

Alyssa Wilmot is a visiting associate professor of theatre and dance this year, filling in for Kim Tritt, who is on sabbatical for the 2010-11 academic year. While new to teaching at Wooster, Wilmot is familiar with the school and the campus, having graduated from the college in 2000 with a major in Philosophy and a double minor in Political Science and Theatre/Dance.

After graduating from Wooster, she went on to Mills College in Oakland, California and received her MFA in Dance Choreography and Performance.

In a recent interview for the Theatre and Dance Department alumni newsletter Wilmot defined herself primarily as “an artist — a conceptual choreographer and an action artist” and regarded dance as “a natural extension of her being.” Her dance is an intricate combination of post-postmodernism, formalist, Fluxus, Dada and anarchism. She claims her dances are “moving geometric sculptures” and, as thematically all-encompassing her style may be, she insists that she is ultimately “interested in and dedicated to causing thoughtful trouble and to being a conscious rebel artist.”

This year at Wooster, Wilmot will be both directing and producing the fall and spring dance concerts. The fall show will feature student choreography and dancing by The College of Wooster Dance Company on Nov. 19 and 20.

The spring show will similarly showcase student choreography, as well as include the work of a well-known guest artist. Wilmot herself also plans to showcase her own work in both shows. Furthermore, The College of Wooster Dance Company will be attending the American College Dance Festival Association, which will be held at The University of Akron this spring. Wilmot will be taking dance pieces and students to the festival to represent The College of Wooster.

Wilmot also hopes to bring in several master guest dance and performance artists to the College and plans to implement and create a performance series on campus that will “happen in unpredictable locations.”...more

Pow! Pow! Naked Fun @ Action Art Festival (NSFW)

The 2nd annual Pow! Pow! Action Art Festival brought together an eclectic mix of experimental artists from all over the globe for three days of live, cutting-edge performances. Warning, not safe for work, unless you work here.

view slide show here

audience feedback from 05.09 u n d i r e c t e d show at CounterPULSE with AHDANCO

"powerful, joyful, emotional, beautiful, phenomenal energy!"

"It was amazing! I liked all the humor. Also, the multimedia aspects. I felt like I personally knew the dancers, Thank you!"

"Some moments brought me to tears...will definitely see them again"

"awesome"

"Superb!"

Freshman dancer recruited by instructors, hits it big

Laura Chao

3/16/09

Patrick Lahey,18, transformed his dance hobby into a career on Feb. 7 when his first professional dance show opened in San Francisco.

Lahey was discovered last fall by Alyssa Lee Wilmot, a CSM dance instructor who directs and choreographs for Group A, a modern dance company based in San Francisco.

Wilmot substituted for Lahey's regular dance class. "He caught my eye because he was really good," Wilmot said.

Soon afterward, Wilmot offered Lahey a part in a dance performance.

Lahey's first show with Group A, "i contact," focused on "intrapersonal and interpersonal communication," according to the show's flier. On Feb. 7, opening night, Lahey performed in front of a live audience after months of practice.

The show premiered at The Garage, an apartment-garage-turned-theater on Howard Street in San Francisco.

The job doesn't come without a price. The dance group meets four times per week, and each practice lasts up to four hours, said Lahey.

To make matter worse, the group meets in San Francisco, which is a 45-minute drive. Lahey sometimes has to miss class to make practices, but overall, he does not feel the job interferes with his learning.

"If I don't dance, my grades go way down and I get really depressed," he said.

Lahey spends over 40 hours each week in a dance studio.

Although Group A is a modern dance company, Lahey's favorite genre is classical ballet.

At Dance Arts Center in San Carlos, Lahey is the first and only male dancer to adopt point shoes since the school began in the 1970s.

"It's for strength training," explained Jayne Zaban, owner and dance teacher at Lahey's dance studio. "He's very quirky, but he's very talented," Zaban said of Lahey.

The Conneticut Nutmeg Conservatory for the Arts has awarded Lahey a full scholarship to their summer ballet program, and offered to keep him for a 2-year apprenticeship program starting this fall.

Lahey performed professionally in a musical theater piece called "Insignificant Others," at San Francisco's Pier 59 through last December. His next performance, a variation on "i contact," will debut this May at the CounterPULSE performing arts center in San Francisco, said Wilmot. "I'm really happy he's been part of Group A," she said.

Information on upcoming "i contact" performances can be found on the Group A website, http://groupadance.com/. [read original]

Pow! Mini Performance Art Festival

Reyhan Harmanci

Thursday, March 6, 2008

The people's reference, Wikipedia, defines performance art as "art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time." A little fuzzy, no?

But Alyssa Lee, one of the founders of the inaugural Pow! Mini Performance Art Festival, didn't have trouble separating the true performance-art submissions from the dance, theater or musical numbers.

"I realized we know what's not performance art more than we know what is. It definitely involves the body in an innovative way, a new way," she says. "It crosses over into a lot of other things - can involve dance, movement, theater, video visual art ... but we knew intuitively that when one thing becomes too heavy, leading over the other things, it's not performance art.

"Basically," she says, "if you go, 'What is that?,' it's performance art."

For the three evenings of programming, Lee and co-curators Guillermo Galindo and Kattt Sammon culled acts from the Bay Area and beyond. Not surprisingly, the performances are hard to describe. Rocket Parlour, from Los Angeles, will do something as Victorian inventors who are trying to establish wireless Internet connection over the Pacific Ocean. Francesco Gagliardi, from Buffalo, N.Y., will contribute pieces that involve video work and an attempt to re-create old movies. WIGBand - Barbara Golden and Johanna Poethig - "basically consider themselves to be trashy feminists," Lee says, so they will be doing something satirical.

The impetus for Pow! came from a frustration that, because the funding for performance art tends to come from grants and gallery shows, the free-form nature can be lost. "You have to make a piece to fit the agenda of a grant or the agenda of a show," Lee says. "We didn't want to have a theme except that it had to be performance art. You can do whatever you want."

The only submission guidelines were that it had to be no longer than 20 minutes and the artists had to show the work being performed (many took the form of YouTube clips).

One group, Los Angeles-based Plastic Arts Performance Parade, sent its submission on pickle juice-drenched paper and included actual pickles in the package. "It's a little mysterious to us what is going on," Lee says. "There's a lot of surprises. ... I mean, they're using pickles. I'm just not exactly sure how."

8 p.m. today. Program, with different lineups, shows through Sat. $10. Space Gallery, 1141 Polk St., S.F. www.spacegallerysf.com.

- Reyhan Harmanci, rharmanci@sfchronicle.com

This article appeared on page G - 20 of the San Francisco Chronicle [read original]

The Joy of the Dance: WestWave Dance Festival

By Linda Ayres-Frederick
Published: July 27, 2006

The premiere of Absence/Presence by Alyssa Lee opened the program’s second half with nine bodies in white lying on stage against a screen that revealed Mark Bartscher’s video (which begins with electro-cardiogram-like images) to the electronic music of Cenk Ergun. The most abstractly philosophical piece, it grows more visceral as the dancers find their gestural language individually, with opening poses held slowly in space as if imprinting them in time. They accelerate as the cymbals drive their tempo. Eventually slowing down, the dancers surrender to the power of gravity. But rising again in a frenzy to run in circles against x-ray-like images, the dancers are eliminated until the final dancer disappears into the void.

read full article here

July 25, 2006

By
ALLAN ULRICH
allan@voiceofdance.com
VoiceofDance.com 2006

The WestWave program last Tuesday evening (July 18) brought an almost capacity crowd into Project Artaud Theater. No major names here, but the fare was heavy on group pieces, which means more friends and family show up at these affairs with cheering sections and bouquets in tow. Again, the curating of producer Joan Lazarus proved a bit cloudy where quality is concerned.

Yet, this sequence brimmed with evidence of trends half-baked and unintegrated. Mark Bartscher provided a compelling video for Alyssa Lee's premiere, Absence/Presence, but all those abstract squiggles had nothing to do with the stretches and bends of the nine women garbed in white, with their backs turned to us through much of the piece. Lee doesn't seem much of a formalist on the evidence here. Tributes to feminist icons are all the rage these days, but it would have taken more than admiration for aviatrix Amelia Earhardt and her sisters to breathe life into Martt Lawrence's Ceiling Zero: New Frontiers (premiere). Accompanied by Thomas Canning's romantic "Fantasy on a Hymn by Justin Morgan," Lawrence, Rebecca Johnson and Jill Randall, all garbed in goggles and ancient flying suits, indulge in a series of wan, lyrical combinations which overstay their welcome by at least half.

Carol Abohatab's Birthday Suite may be three years old... [more]

FALL ARTS PREVIEW DANCE

Rachel Howard

Sunday, August 27, 2006

...NOVEMBER group A: Brainy, ambitious choreographer Alyssa Lee maintains a long roster of multimedia collaborators. This young company's fall season mixes light installations, Turkish pop, experimental electronic music and formalist-minded dancing. Nov. 3-4, CounterPulse, 1310 Mission St., San Francisco. (415) 435-7552, www.groupAdance.com.

This article appeared on page PK - 30 of the San Francisco Chronicle [read original]

Pop goes the dancing ODC Theater's "Underserved II: Pop!" sizzles and fizzles
By Rita Felciano
a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Underserved," the label ODC Theater stuck on a 2004 group program, is a slippery term because it could be applied to most San Francisco artists. The definition of what it means to be underserved depends on an individual's perspective – in this case, that of theater director Rob Bailis, who came up with the concept when he found himself stuck with an otherwise empty house. The first incarnation featured some truly unheralded voices. For 2006, "Underserved II: Pop!" went slightly upscale. Bailis sent out a call for proposals for five-minute pieces using popular music, from which he chose the 8 participants (last time there were 11). The result, not surprisingly, was a mixed bag, ranging from the very accomplished to the barely competent, all of it hooted and hollered over by a packed audience.
...Alyssa Lee's fine Tabi Tabi, to Turkish singer Ibrahim Tatlises's song of the same name, was the evening's most politically inspired work. Dressed in cutoff fatigues, the four warrior women of Lee's Group A moved both within aggressive unisons and with individualized expressivity. The result was a good, tightly structured work by a young choreographer.
Though many in the audience apparently did...[more]

group A + Alley Ink

By Ken Schneck
02/26/05

The premier of Lionel Ritchie at the William Way Center in Philadelphia on February 3rd, 2005 was an outstanding success. The brainchild of choreographer George Alley of Alley Ink and Alyssa Lee Wilmot of group A dance company, with music by Cenk Ergun, Lionel Ritchie redefined dance as a theatrical, visual, and intellectual art form. With wit, elegance, humor, and obscenity, this collaborative work engaged its audience to a level seldom reached by a typical run of the mill concert dance piece.

Alley's and Wilmot's performance was strong, with highlights of pedestrian movement riveting enough to make the Judson Church roll over. Choreographically, their mix of repetition with the everyday made an interesting hybrid. Musically, Ergun's electronic score was not only riveting but also intelligent, and the interaction between the dance and the music was expertly polished. Ergun's piece left the audience wanting more of his hypnotic slow and steady pulse accented with ironic samples from the Home Shopping Network.

During the entire piece, the dancers paid homage to the 80's while encouraging one's memory to travel beyond pop culture. As Alley, Wilmot, and dancer Craig Scull (who executed his movements flawlessly) frantically pulled apart plastic baggies retrieved out of a vintage suitcase, one wondered for what excursion they had signed up. But somehow this trip to nowhere in particular proved to be completely satisfying, in part due to the lasting final and messy image of the piece - completed by Julius Cesar, a podium, folding chairs, footprints, and a powder covered dance floor- an interactive artifact impossible to be recreated in any other manner.

All in all, Lionel Ritchie is one dance not to be missed. Alley and Wilmot are up and coming choreographers whose work may just in fact change the face of the dance world as we know it. Plunging their audiences into absurdity and darkness, glamour and beauty, Alley and Wilmot are the new generation of experimental dance.

-Ken Schneck, 2005

Berkeley: For inventor, music comes in many odd packages

Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005

Sudhu Tewari is a young audio gadgeteer with a simple motto: If it makes noise, it can make music...[more]

This article appeared on page F - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Rock, The Boat Art and music o'er the waves
published: September 21, 2005 SAT 9/24

Things to see An electro-rock/new-wavey dance/art show on a ferryboat? If you had asked me a week ago when acclaimed Bay Area knob-twiddler Blevin Blectum would perform on a three-story Blue & Gold Fleet vessel, I'd have said something about pigs and flying: Never gonna happen. But while I remain convinced of the incompatibility of the porcine and the airborne, "The Boat Show" proves me wrong on that first count, as Blectum joins a slate of other innovators on a three-hour tour. I'm serious! Phase Chancellor with Martin Schmidt of Matmos, light-installation imp Nathalie Roland, and video artists Kendra Juul and Kristin Miltner are some of the other swabs onboard this Whisper Culture production.

Group A dance company should be excellent (and slightly less surprising) company on deck, as the ferry takes passengers past the bridges and islands: One of the troupe's recent stunts involved about 1,000 feet of plastic wrap and Yerba Buena Gardens. More music by rockers the Mall and sample-mad duo miba rounds out the roster. Don't miss the boat at 8 p.m. at Pier 39, Beach & Embarcadero, S.F. Admission is $20-25; call (510) 420-5282 or visit www.whisperculture.com.

-- Hiya Swanhuyser

[read original article]

May 4, 2003
By ALLAN ULRICH
allan@voiceofdance.com

Back in the 1980s, Molissa Fenley symbolized the almost visceral excitement that could occasionally penetrate the dreary shell of conceptualism, the carapace that postmodernism understandably liked to put on for protection against a hostile world. Although based in New York, she appeared often in the Bay Area because her roots were at small Mills College in Oakland, where she periodically returned for master classes and testing of new material. With six women in tow, Fenley, now an eternally youthful 49, came back over the weekend for what she called an evening of contemporary dance at the ODC Theater in San Francisco.

Actually, the performance Friday (May 3) was a catch-up affair after an absence of several years. A premiere, Water Courses, is a dance that Fenley plans to try out at New York's Lincoln Center this summer. Two other dances, Delta (2000) and 331 Steps (2002), had not been given previously in the Bay Area. One revival, Hemispheres (Part IV), recalled Fenley's first visit to ODC in 1983. In the first half Friday, in order to give Fenley a break, an excerpt by a Mills graduate was included, a number that looked very much like a dissertation subject that you wouldn't see outside of college dance departments these days. It was a boring little essay with suggestions of looking over the shoulder paranoia, but I am glad it was there. Fenley, unlike this hapless soloist, never reeked of the academy. Indeed, the Mills experience was probably what she needed to curb her almost incredible energy and lend it a kind of pedigree.

And, yes, Fenley continues to amaze. The short cropped coiffure is still there and so is the legendary stamina that a decade ago propelled her through a topless dance set to the complete Stravinsky Rite of Spring . What remains, too, is Fenley's genius for inhabiting a phrase, for seeing it through to the last moment; she holds an arm out, with a palm flat in the air and you know she believes it in every sinew. In Delta, which is a duet with Paz Tanjuaquio set to pianist Maro Ajemian's classic recording of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes, the tension between the dancers never materializes because Tanjuaquio, a good performer, just can't deliver and shape the way Fenley can.

She is into group work these days, what the program handout calls a third phase of her career, and some promise was evident in Water Courses, which also recruited Dena Bermann, Nora Chipaumire, Alexis Mian and Alyssa Wilmot, contracting and expanding in eddies of movement to a taped vocal score by Joy Harjo. Fenley tries a bit of everything here - discontinuity, unisons, patterning - but the group dynamic eludes her. What looks remarkable on Fenley's trim frame simply doesn't translate to the bodies of others. 331 Steps is a trio inspired by the 331 steps and instructions that comprise the chanoyu, Japanese tea ceremony. You could not discern any of this from seeing the dance, a kind of postmodern number. The three dancers (Fenley, Mian, Tanjuaquio), all in bright contrasting colors, are each tethered to the wall by a long sash; at some point, those sashes are tangled - rather bald symbolism for a kind of sisterhood ethos that has been, happily, missing from Fenley's work till now... [more]