Julia K Gleich Director and Choreographer Gleich is a choreographer, teacher, scholar, and mathematics aficionado, is interested in re-contextualizing ballet, creating new environments for traditional works and illuminating the relationships between the traditional and the contemporary. Ms. Gleich, who resides in London and Bushwick, is on faculty at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (London, UK) since 2003 and is Head of Choreography at London Studio Centre. Gleich has been on faculty at the University of Utah Ballet Department and Manhattanville College and Molloy College in New York. She holds an MFA from the University of Utah and MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her company, Gleich Dances, formed in Jackson Hole, WY in 1993 – becoming Gleich Dances in NYC 1995 with two seasons at JoyceSoHo (’01, ’03) and critical notice in the New York Times, Village Voice and recently Brooklyn Rail and The New Criterion. The company has performed throughout the United States and in the UK.
In 2004, Ms. Gleich with Jason Andrew founded Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts with a mission to renew and refresh the exchange between the interdisciplinary arts. Ms. Gleich is also a founder and director of Aegis Live Arts, creating unique locational dance works that enliven history and architecture in London. She is a regular master teacher for Burklyn Ballet Theatre, VT, teaching workshops in contemporary ballet practice and generating new choreography. Her practice-based research on vectors and dance was published in the Dynamic Body in Space. Gleich oversees the annual London Studio Centre/Central St. Martins College of Art design for dance collaborations and taught classes for Michael Clark Company on “the largest dance floor in Europe” at Tate Modern Turbine Hall.
Gleich’s site-specific dance works include performances in drained pools, on piers, in train stations and an annual stunt in WalMart parking lot in Plattsburgh, NY (’04,’05,’06,’07). She was commissioned to create a site-specific work for the opening of St. Pancras International train station in 2007. She has collaborated with composers, musicians, designers, directors and writers and welcomes new ideas to challenge her own aesthetic. In addition to self-produced work, she has created commissions for Island Moving Company-Rhode Island, University of California-Irvine, and University of Northern Colorado-Greeley among others. In 2002 she was a ballet busker on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. She recently produced her first video work, 14 seconds, which was exhibited at NYCAMS.
Ryan Anthony Francis Musical Director American composer Ryan Anthony Francis (b.1981) has spent his career drawing upon aesthetically diverse sources of inspiration from his music. Most recently, his work High Line for orchestra was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. High Line was Francis’s musical response to the newly opened High Line park on the west side of Manhattan. Other recent projects have included a set of piano pieces inspired by Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, an electro-acoustic arrangement of Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring that he conceived of with fellow composer Ricardo Romaniero for Wordless Music and Celebrate Brooklyn, and a new piano concerto for Metropolis Ensemble.
Projects for the 2012-2013 season include a premiere for the Oregon Ballet Theater with choreographer Pontus Lidberg, Goldberg Machines, to be premiered and recorded by pianist Conor Hanick, and a commissioned work for the Nu:BC Collective.
Born in Portland, Oregon, Francis trained at the Juilliard School, where he received his masters and doctoral degrees in composition as a student of Robert Beaser. He also holds a bachelors of composition from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Bright Sheng. His music is available on Tzadik, Albany and New Dynamic Records. He currently resides in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Tamara Gonzales Décor and Costumes Gonzales is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Vibrant and witty, her paintings spring to the optical extreme through her unique process of spray painting through found lace tablecloths, doilies, and curtains. Gonzales combines large gesture with tight pattern to create compositions that at once mimic the grand heroic gestures of the postwar painters, while capturing all-over free spirit found in the graffiti that appears daily on the streets near her Bushwick studio. Her work has been described as “one part Fourteenth Street and one part dirt road.” The Brooklyn Rail described her work as “feminine machismo.” Inspirations are drawn from eclectic sources: Baroque churches, pagan rituals of the Day of the Dead, rose windows, textiles from an open market in India. She has exhibited her paintings most recently at Norte Maar and The Dependent Art Fair with James Fuentes Gallery. For The Brodmann Areas Tamara has drawn on her memories of being lost, and subsequently found, by Tigger in Disneyland. Tamara would like to make a special shout out and thanks to Martin Keehn, artist, menswear designer, and owner of 27 1/2 Essex for rad clothes.