Summation Dance Kicks Off DANCING LITERATE Festival Today

Sumi Clements, Artistic Director and Associate Artistic Director, Taryn Vander Hoop, co-founders of Summation Dance, announced the dates of their third annual Dancing Literate Festival, today, November 21-23, 2013, featuring performances by emerging companies and choreographers. The successful annual program aims to bridge the gap between the artist and the viewer by offering educational opportunities on the choreographic process and by providing an interactive experience in which the audience is encouraged to engage with dance making firsthand.

The November 21-23 evenings will include works by Suzanne Beahrs, Sidra Bell, Sumi Clements, and Taryn Vander Hoop performed by three dance companies.

Today, November 21st performance artist and Dance noise founder Lucy Sexton will welcome the audience with a brief lecture on "what to look for in dance" and conclude the evening with a moderated Q & A between the choreographers, dancers and audience. Laura Diffenderfer, Programming Associate at The Joyce Theater Foundation, will guide November 22nd's evening and November 23rd's moderator will be Zia Artists Director, Ken Maldonado. Past participants include: Sidra Bell, Peter Kyle, Andrea Miller and Kendra Portier.

The lively exchange between audience, experienced artists and emerging choreographers is the core of Dancing Literate, as well as exposing new audience members to modern dance and providing educational opportunities.

Choreographer Suzanne Beahrs presents "Whether" performed by her company, Suzanne Beahrs Dance. "Whether" concerns the friction between fully embodying the present moment and being devastated that we can't hold on to it. Each of five dancers navigates her individual journey, propelling through the space while moving in and out of unison with the others. The surrounding emptiness of a large space contributes to the tone of this raw and physical dance, accompanied by choral compositions by Josquin Des Prez and Dominico Scarlatti.

Suzanne Beahrs currently teaches at Dance New Amsterdam, and has also taught at Dancewave. Her work has been presented at many NYC venues including the 92nd St. Y, FAB Festival, and Dance on the Greenway, commissioned by Dance Theater Etc. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Beahrs has shown her work at the Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley as 2010 Artist in Residence as well as at the 2011 West Wave Dance Festival (ODC Theater). She currently is a Give/Get/Grow Resident Artist at Cora Dance in Brooklyn. Beahrs has performed with Mare Nostrum Elements, Purring Tiger (Kiori Kawai), and Carol Mendes & Artists (NY) and Ishika Seth and Dancers, Dance Ceres, Mo Miner, Christine Cali, and others (CA). Beahrs received her MFA in Dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. suzannebeahrs.org

Choreographer Sidra Bell presents "ReVUE (excerpts) performed by Sidra Bell Dance New York. The thirteen sketches of "ReVUE" (World Premier, 2010- Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, PA) range in mood from ribald and humorous to melancholic and haunting. Bell used words as the driving force from which the performers' fantasies departed. The audience is led into a world of jockeys, ringleaders, cigarette ads, sad clowns, detached omniscient symbols, conjoined twins and many more. The landscape is a house of mirrors, a house of horrors, and a house of cards falling down. "ReVUE" was created with support from the Kelly Strayhorn Theater Next Stage Artist Residency and Commissioning Program and The Duo Theatre Full Length Commissioning Series.

Sidra Bell is currently a Master Lecturer at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), was Adjunct Professor at Barnard College (Columbia University), and has a degree in history from Yale University and an MFA in Choreography from Purchase College Conservatory of Dance. She was awarded a 1st Prize for Choreography for "Grief Point," at the 15th Internationales Solo Tanz Theater Festival in Stuttgart, Germany (2011). She was awarded the Patricia Kerr Ross Award for Choreography from New York Foundation for the Arts in 2005. Her critically acclaimed company and choreography has been seen throughout the United States and internationally in Denmark, France, Austria, Turkey, Germany, China, Canada, Aruba, Korea, Brazil and Greece. The Company was lauded in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette's 2010 Best in Dance for "ReVUE," and in the 2012 Year in Review in ArtsATL's notable performances for "Nudity". Bell has received many commissions for new work from internationally renowned companies and institutions around the world. Bell is a sought after master teacher and her alternative approach was featured in Dance Teacher Magazine (2012) and Dance Studio Life Magazine (2013). She has taught her unique creative practice of movement, improvisation, and technique entitled Contemporary Systems - An Interior & Material Approach at major institutions for dance and theater throughout Canada, Europe, South America, and the United States.

Choreographer Sumi Clements presents "Updating Route, Please Standby," a World Premiere, performed by Summation Dance. "Updating Route, Please Standby" contemplates the relationship between expectation and reality, and the necessity for an ever-present openness to recalculate our positions in life. The piece takes into consideration how society, the media, literature, and other forms of visual culture have molded our understanding of what we are to achieve within certain time frames, and dismisses these preconceptions in favor of simple re-evaluation and advancement. Our lives rarely materialize in the way we envision; and even though the outcome might not be so different from the intended one, the route there winds dramatically.

Clements is a Japanese-American who hails from California. Clements received her BFA in Dance from the University of California at Santa Barbara where she was the recipient of the Patricia Sparrow Scholarship & Corwin Award for Choreography. She promptly moved to New York where she was a member of Peter Kyle Dance and involved in various projects around the city before returning to study at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Upon receiving her MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography, she went on to co-found Summation Dance, showing work at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Judson Memorial Church, Danspace at St. Mark's Church, the 92nd St Y, Baruch College, La Mama, FlicFest at the Irondale Center, and Dance New Amsterdam, among others. She has worked with Gerald Casel Dance Company and Sarah Holmes Danceworks, and has performed in the works of Doug Varone, Alwin Nikolais, Kyle Abraham, Andrea Miller and Sydney Skybetter. Clements has completed a commission/residency at UC Santa Barbara, will be on faculty this summer at Boulder Jazz Dance Workshop in Colorado, and is a Dance Education Laboratory graduate.

Choreographer Taryn Vander Hoop presents "Splinters in Your Mind" performed by Summation Dance to an original composition by Kyle Olson. "Splinters in your Mind" explores the hectic nature of modern day living, and the matrix of society that confines us. Six dancers attempt to break free of the vicious cycle of overwork inherent in our everyday lives, only to get swept back up into the motion surrounding them. The work questions the importance of these brief yet powerful respites from the chaos and asks us to consider whether we luxuriate in these moments or allow the distractions to sweep us back into the matrix.

Vander Hoop is originally from Wisconsin, where she received her BS in Dance, English Literature, and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While at UW, she was privileged to perform for Li Chiao-Ping Dance and Jin-Wen Yu Dance, as well as several guest artists including: Bill Evans, Larry Keigwin, Jeremy Nelson, and Lara Luis Malvacias. In 2008, she moved to NYC to pursue her MFA at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in Dance Performance and Choreography. Upon graduation, she co-founded Summation Dance and has produced sold-out performances at Baryshnikov Arts Center and Judson Memorial Church. She has also been involved in projects with Gerald Casel Dance, Laura Peterson Choreography, and Sarah Holmes Danceworks, and performed the works of Andrea Miller and Sydney Skybetter. Since moving to NYC, Vander Hoop has shown her choreography at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Danspace, Peridance, and the World Dance Alliance Festival. She has also studied at the Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) and is a DEL Foundations graduate. In addition to running Summation Dance, she is also a freelance Marketing Consultant and Yoga Instructor.

Summation Dance Company, founded by Sumi Clements and Taryn Vander Hoop, is a New York City based modern Dance Company with a mission to find the beauty in struggle and the humor in the mundane by creating exciting, innovative, and highly physical work.

In 2010, Summation Dance founders Clements and Vander Hoop graduated with their MFAs in Dance Performance and Choreography from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Since the spring of 2010, Summation Dance has self-produced and premiered two evening length works, "Keep Your Feathers Dry" and "Deep End," at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a 2013 season at BAM's Fisher Space featuring "Pathological Parenthetical Pageantry," and the World Premiere of "Shift," as well as producing their annual dance education outreach festival, Dancing Literate, at Judson Memorial Church. Additionally, NYU Tisch School of the Arts hosted Summation's Benefit for Japan, which featured a remounting of "Keep Your Feathers Dry" and a special performance by musician Kelli Scarr. The company has also performed in the La MaMa Moves Festival, World Dance Alliance Conference, FAB Festival, DUMBO Dance Festival, and the Fridays at Noon Series at the 92nd St Y, at Judson Memorial Church, St. Mark's Church, San Francisco's ZSpace, and the Skirball Center.

Summation Dance strives to bridge the gap between the choreographer and the viewer, so that our art is no longer esoteric and understood only by the dance elite, but can be universally appreciated. Summation Dance offers dance and arts education programs for children and young adults with educational outreach programs bringing dance into the schools, offering performances, as well as movement and composition classes, to children who may not otherwise have exposure to the arts.

Third Annual Dancing Literate Project

November 21, 22 & 23, 2013

All performances 8pm

Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012

Tickets: General Admission $25/Students $20 available at www.summationdance.org/tickets.

For further information www.summationdance.org.

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