2020: a world, a world

• Direction/choreography/set design: Linda Austin
• Co-creation and performance: claire barrera, Muffie Delgado Connelly, Nancy Ellis, Hannah Krafcik, Danielle Ross, and Noelle Stiles
• Visual and costume design: Sarah Marguier
• Sound design: Seth Nehil
• Lighting Design: Jeff Forbes

2017: a world, a world

• Direction/choreography/set design: Linda Austin
• Co-creation and performance: claire barrera, jin camou, Nancy Ellis, keyon gaskin, Jen Hackworth, Allie Hankins, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Takahiro Yamamoto.
• Visual and costume design: Sarah Marguier
• Sound design: Seth Nehil
• Lighting Design: Jeff Forbes

2016: the last bell rings for you

• Direction/choreography/set design: Linda Austin
• Co-creation and performance: claire barrera, jin camou, Nancy Ellis, keyon gaskin, Jen Hackworth, Allie Hankins, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, and Takahiro Yamamoto.
• Visual elements: Mo Ritter
  
• Sound design: John Berendzen
  
• Lighting Design: Jeff Forbes

2015: Solo Relay Series: see below

Linda Austin (choreographer/director)
delights in and is provoked by how her dance practices and obsessions contradict each other. She has been choreographing and performing, often with a strong visual element and a commitment to original music, for more than three decades, while fostering the creation of her own and many others’ work through Performance Works NorthWest for the past 15 years. Her work exploits and explores the body’s powers and limits, bringing each performer’s vulnerabilities and strengths, accidents of awkwardness and elegance, into a web of relationships—intimate, playful, confrontational—with other bodies, objects, environment, sound and media. The resultant works are non-linear, poetic, often laced with humor, deploying movement that often disrupts what is generally considered “dancerly. Honors received include Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission, and most recently, an award of $20,000 as a Regional Arts & Culture Council Fellow in the Performing Arts. http://pwnw-pdx.org/linda-austin-dance/

John Berendzen (composer)
has been creating electroacoustic music and sound for the theatre, dance and arts communities in Portland and elsewhere for over 20 years. He is the resident composer and sound designer for Liminal performance group, has collaborated with Imago Theater, Mary Oslund and Co. Dance, Hand2Mouth Theatre, and others. John’s focus is human voices interacting with technology. He aims for a totalism of perceptual experience and a heightened awareness of the sound medium and its technical means of production. He enjoys strict limitation of materials and processes, and a holographic, self-recursive approach to nested and overlapping time structures. He has performed at the Portland Art Center, The Bell House in Brooklyn, and the 2008 Seville Bienniale. John was one of the last sound engineers to work in Manhattan’s now-dead Knitting Factory. In addition to studying raga with Michael Stirling and Terry Riley, he spent a year with minimalist godfather La Monte Young as an intern, student, and sound recordist.

Morgan Ritter (visual elements)
has a BA in Intermedia from the Pacific Northwest College of Art (2011). Her visual and written work has been exhibited through institutions such as the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), the Henry Art Museum (Seattle), LUMA Foundation (Zurich) and Centre Pompidou (Paris).  She has been awarded residencies in New Mexico, New York, Washington and Colorado. Ritter has published three books and is working on a new poetry book via Ambient Press (NY) and a multi-media release with Musical Archive (LA). Her collaboration with Swedish Artist/Poet Karl Larsson entitled, Commonplace, opens in September as part of PICA’s TBA Festival in the visual art exhibition.
See more of her work at www.mmmo.info.

Allie Hankins (dramaturg/scribe)
is a performer & performance maker, teacher, and researcher currently residing in Portland. She is an inaugural member of FLOCK, a new dance center & creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists, and a founding member of Physical Education, a critical & casual, reading & researching, drinking & dialoguing, dance & performance body comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lucy Lee Yim. She was most recently seen performing in works by Taka Yamamoto & Tahni Holt, and in her own solo Like A Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth. Her new endeavors include a project in progress titled better to be alone than to wish you were, her all-levels movement class Transcendentaerobicourage, and learning  American Sign Language, which, as it turns out, is one of her greatest passions. alliehankins.com & physsicalleduucationn.wordpress.com

Jeff Forbes (lighting)
Husband to Linda Austin, co-founder and technical director of PWNW. Proud papa to Delaney and Delilah. Formerly proud papa to Boris and Natasha, Samuel Buckett, and Marie the Escape Artist (RIP). Spends much of his time arranging lights around dancers.

DANCERS

April 10 & 11

Jin Camou
I am a performer, choreographer, and teacher based in Portland, OR. My practice in dance and performance began at the University of Hawai’i, and includes solo and collaborative work in the Pacific NW, the UK, and NYC, with an upcoming project in LA. Recent projects include a 200hr yoga training largely informed by Body-Mind Centering® and a duet exploring the sci-fi version of bodysnatching. Awards include a 2013 grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. I am currently choreographing for a fashion designer, and am a participant in Linda Austin’s (Un)Made.

keyon gaskin
doesn’t care to contextualize
your experience
of his performance(s)
with his credentials.

May 8 & 9

Matthew Shyka
A recent transplant to the Rose City from Santa Cruz and the San Francisco Bay area, dancer/choreographer Matthew transgresses state, nation, and dimensional borders in her corporeal experiments in composition and performance. He is delighted to be working with Linda and co. on this intrepid project and is looking forward to meeting more folks from the PDX dance/performance scene.

Linda K. Johnson
is a native Oregonian who is in the middle of her 4th decade as an artist in this community. Since returning to Portland from the Bay Area in 1986 to teach in the Jefferson H.S. Dance Program, she has contributed significantly to the vitality and development of the regional dance community as a maker/composer, dancer/performer, teacher/educator, arts administrator, curator, mentor, and collaborator. She is the grateful recipient of many grants, awards, and fellowships – both regional and national, for her work over these many years, and has – along the way, authored curriculum, opened studios, and supported the audaciously creative activity of her beloved peers. She loves teaching The Alexander Technique, being the custodian of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal work – Trio A, teaching in the surging PSU dance program, and of course, being a mom. She also loves Linda Austin a lot, and will really miss TC Smith – the god of all things that each of us needed in an instant, so very much.

June 12 & 13

Nancy Ellis
has performed extensively in New York City, throughout the U.S. and abroad with Yanira Castro, Maura Nguyen Donohue, and Annie-B Parson & Paul Lazar, among others. Since moving to Portland in 2006, she has worked with Jennifer Monson (TBA 2006), Hand2Mouth Theater, Tahni Holt, Linda Austin, Katherine Longstreth and Dawn Stoppiello. Nancy began making her own work in 2014, with generous support from the N.E.W. Residency program at Studio 2@Zoomtopia. She is a 2015 Alembic Resident at Performance Works NW and will present Nancy’s NANCY in June 2015 at On the Boards’ Northwest New Works Festival in Seattle.

Robert Tyree
works to empower artists and engage audiences of contemporary performance. Tyree grew into dance between the University of Washington, dancing in clubs and danceWEB at ImPulzTanz. He has performed for a number of choreographers in Portland—notably for Tahni Holt. Tyree is co-director of FRONT, a newspaper devoted to writing from the field of contemporary dance. roberttyree.net

July 10 & 11

Tahni Holt
persists in creating time and place for process, inquiry and practice; for her community as well as for herself. Her dance making, her teachings, and her organizational endeavors all aim toward a central goal: to create important conversations – be they in movement or in language – that enrich those who engaged in them, and that would not exist without the initiative that fostered them. She has traveled extensively as a choreographer, performer, teacher and student, and is profoundly inspired by colleagues around the world who situate their artistic practices to utilize the best artistic conditions. All of Holt’s endeavors are shaped by her beliefs; convictions which invigorate proactive projects of artist-driven empowerment. To find out more about these endeavors please go to: www.tahniholt.com

Jen Hackworth
is a choreographer, performer, and teacher based in Portland, OR. Jen has performed locally with Tere Mathern, Linda Austin,The DECEPTiCONS, Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Taka Yamamoto. She is currently apart of the N.E.W. residency program and co-teaches Dance/Play/Move, a creative movement class for young people with keyon gaskin at PWNW. For the past five summers, Hackworth has served as a faculty member for Generation IV, a summer dance intensive at Smith College, MA. Jen started training and performing at a young age at her family’s dance studio in Easthampton, MA.

August 7 & 8

Linda Austin
(reprise of March 10/11 solo)

DREAM TEAM: Claire Barrera, Danielle Ross, Noelle Stiles, Takahiro Yamamoto

claire barrera
is a performer and artist based in Portland, OR. In the recent past she created and performed in the duet Pyramid at Performance Works Northwest, and performed in Beast by Jen Hackworth for Dance + Festival. She co-edits the zine When Language Runs Dry and will be published in the anthology Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines in fall of 2015.

Danielle Ross
is a Portland-based choreographer who holds a BFA in Dance and Performance Studies from University of California, Berkeley. Ross’ works have included Make The Air Thick, Home/Body, To Remember Is To Jump Around There and most recently, Togetherness, a collaboration with Stacey Tran that premiered at BodyVox Dance in November, 2014. Ross has worked with Linda Austin, Dawn Stoppiello and Zoe/Juniper, and is one of the founders of FRONT, a newspaper dedicated to contemporary dance and performance, on the board of the Creative Music Guild and a co-curator of the film/text/movement series Pure Surface, alongside Tran. daniellerossdance.com

Noelle Stiles
is interested in how and where experience is held in the body. This interest provides the framework for extracting the corporeal language that both connects and individuates us. She has a BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts and completed graduate studies in dance at The Ohio State University where she was awarded a Schlesinger Fellowship and a Wexner Center for the Arts Assistantship. She has performed and presented work at venues such as the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s (PICA) Time-Based Art Festival (2004, 2007, 2010), On The Boards, PWNW, Dance New Amsterdam (NYC), and Links Hall (CHI). Stiles has taught at The Ohio State University, the Governor’s School of North Carolina, and Dance/USA’s Engaging Dance Audiences program (PICA). She conceived and co-founded the community focused dance class series Heavy Rotation with Kathleen Keogh. Her work has been supported by Caldera’s Artist Residency program, PICA’s Resource Room Residency, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the Associate Artist Residency program, and selected by the National Dance Project and PICA to attend the Dublin Dance Festival as part of a pilot international exchange program for choreographers. From 2010-2014, she co-directed and designed the dance publication, FRONT (ed. 1-4). FRONT has been distributed nationally and internationally, and supported by the Precipice Fund, a regional regranting program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts administered by PICA. noellestiles.com

Takahiro Yamamoto
Originally from Shizuoka, Japan, Takahiro is an artist based in Portland, working specifically in live performance and photography. Both his solo performance and visual art works have been shown at Center on Contemporary Arts (Seattle), Rowan Gallery (Los Angeles), 937 Gallery, PLACE gallery and Disjecta (Portland). He has performed for and studied with Xavier Le Roy (Montpellier), Opiyo Okach (Nairobi), Mårten Spångberg (Stockholm), Keith Hennessy (San Francisco), Jmy James (Los Angeles), Anne Bogart and SITI Company (New York), Perseverance Theatre Company (Alaska) and others. He holds a master of fine arts degree in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art. He co-directs a performance company madhause with Ben Evans, and a part of Portland-based group Physical Education. takahiroyamamoto.com