Meet the choreographers and artists of CounterPointe10
This March, Norte Maar brings forth CounterPointe10, the longest standing performance production exclusively featuring collaborations between female dance makers and visual artists. The performances will take place at downtown Brooklyn’s Mark O’Donnell Theater at the Entertainment Community Fund from March 24-26, 2023. Tickets here.
We are pleased to introduce the seven CounterPointe10 choreographers and their collaborating artists:
Julia K Gleich is a Brooklyn-based choreographer and teacher who has worked across the US, Europe, Japan, and Hong Kong. She has been making contemporary ballets for over 30 years and currently teaches at Peridance in NYC. Her company, Gleich Dances has performed in the UK and US including seasons at The Broadway Theatre, London, NYC’s Joyce SoHo, and the Centre for Performance Research, receiving critical notice in The New York Times, Village Voice, The New Criterion, TwoCoatsofPaint.com, dancelog.com, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her conceptual dance films have been exhibited in NYC, and Singapore. Julia is Co-Founder with Jason Andrew, of Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts and curates and produces the annual CounterPointe Collaborations program. Julia spent over 20 years teaching BA- and MA-level dance in higher education at the University of Utah, Manhattanville College, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (UK) and London Studio Centre (UK). She led the Design for Dance and Co-Lab Projects in collaboration with Central St. Martins College of Art and Design for 13 years. She was the recipient of an Arts Council England Grant in 2013, the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Utah 2014, a Choreographer Observership with English National Ballet 2016. Recent residencies include University of Buffalo Art Galleries, and The Tang Teaching Museum at Saratoga Springs in a collaboration with artists, Nicole Cherubini and Meg Lipke. Her writings about dance and ballet with Molly Faulkner have been published in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet, and in an anthology for Intellect Books (Re)Claiming Ballet. Julia's original research on vector movement theories is published in the Dynamic Body in Space.
Photo by Kyle Dorosz
Tamara Gonzales works with a variety of painted patterned motifs both in figuration and abstraction. Textiles and nature often inspire her works, while others are created through her own generative mark-making on paper or canvas. Over the last ten years Gonzales’ travels to Peru, and her visionary experiences and friendships with the Shipibo people have become a source of both inspiration and collaboration in her work. Working in her studio in Brooklyn and upstate New York, Gonzales develops her own visual language, resulting in a wonderful mixture of exuberant color, energetic line, and archetypal imagery. Her work has been written about in the New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, and ArtNews. Recently her work was shown at Anton Kern Gallery Window, The Pit in Los Angeles, Venus Over Manhattan in New York (curated by Peter &Sally Saul), the New York Studio School, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Public collections containing her work include the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, the Bronx Museum of Art, and Bowdoin College and Colby College Museums of Art, ME and the San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas.
https://klausgallery.com/artist/tamara-gonzales
@tamaragonzales
Shannon Harkins is a New York City-based dance artist. She began her dance training at The Washington School of Ballet, where she performed in Septime Webre’s world premieres of The Great Gatsby and Alice (in Wonderland) at the John F. Kennedy Center. She trained at Walnut Hill School for the Arts and has attended summer programs at Ballet Austin, Charlotte Ballet, LINES Ballet, and Arts Umbrella in Vancouver. Shannon graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College, SUNY, where she performed works by Norbert de la Cruz III, Hannah Garner, and Maurya Kerr. Her choreography was featured in the Young Voices in Dance program at Battery Dance Festival in 2022. She strives to create work that combines aspects of enhanced classical technique with added nuances, theatrics, and humor.
Exploring folly while exploiting failure, Sarah Pettitt attempts to trigger an affective charge through material anecdote. Influenced by the parallels between archaic and minimalist aesthetics, recent work focuses on cycles and collapse in terms of belief and site. Pettitt has been resident artist at the Vermont Studio Centre and participated in PRAKSISOSLO’s residency Out Looking Inwards (2019), a practical investigation into the concerns of contemporary painting. She has exhibited across the U.K and the U.S including the Jerwood Gallery, UCL Museum, ATP London, SPRING / BREAK, Norte Maar, Mana Contemporary and The Art Complex Museum Boston. Pettitt received her MA in Painting and Art Theory from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London (2013). She lives and works in New York.
Photo by Joe Raffanti
Tiffany Mangulabnan is a New York-based Filipino dancer and choreographer and a founding co-artistic director of Brooklyn-based contemporary ballet company konverjdans. Born and raised in Manila, she performed as a principal dancer with the Philippine Ballet Theatre before moving to New York City in 2012. She has since freelanced as a dancer with companies such as BalletNext, Claudia Schreier & Co., Emery LeCrone DANCE, Gleich Dances, Indelible Dance, John Passafiume Dancers, The Metropolitan Opera, Pigeonwing Dance, Terra Firma Dance, and others. Since she began choreographing in 2016, she has choreographed several works for the stage as well as written and directed a handful of short films. Her piece '(Listening) Through Walls' was presented at the 38th Annual Battery Dance Festival; her first dance film, ‘HER PRIDE’, was screened at Earl Mosley’s 2021 'Dance is Activism' film festival; and her first documentary short, ‘Behind the Puzzle Pieces’ was nominated for Best Documentary Short at the 2022 Seattle Film Festival. In 2021 she was selected as one of only four choreographers for Dance Lab NY's Female Choreographers of Color in Ballet Lab, and in 2022 her piece 'Chosen Oceans' was performed at New York Live Arts by students from Barnard College/Columbia University, where she was a guest choreographer. This is Tiffany's second CounterPointe creation as an independent choreographer.
In her installations the Brooklyn-based artist Etty Yaniv coalesces material fragments—photographs, paintings, scraps from previous installations and found materials—into textured clusters which seem like abstracted landscapes from afar and reveal narrative vignettes from close-up. Her process reflects preoccupation with transience, ephemerality, and the possibilities in perpetual change. Yaniv exhibited in solo and group show sat multiple venues including the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel, State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, Newark Museum of Art, NJ, Monmouth Museum of Art, NJ, Torrance Art Museum, CA, AIR gallery, Brooklyn, Purdue University, IN, Zero1 Biennial, San Francisco, and Leipziger Baumwollspinnerie, Germany. In 2022 her site-specific installation, Inversion, exhibited in Palazzo Mora, Art Biennale, Venice. It focused on how new morphologies emerge at the Venice Lagoon as the tidal system reacts to human infrastructure. Yaniv founded the online art publication Art Spiel and serves as its chief editor. She also teaches graduate classes at the MFA program in Pennsylvania Academy of Art. Yaniv holds BA in Psychology and Literature from Tel Aviv University, BFA from Parsons School of Design, and MFA from SUNY Purchase.
Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon is a New York City based, Italian and American choreographer and recent graduate from Barnard College of Columbia University where she combined her interests in evolutionary biology with storytelling and dance. Raised in Paris, France she trained in ballet at the Académie Américaine de Danse de Paris from 2005-2015.She then moved to San Francisco where she trained at the San Francisco Academy of Ballet until 2018. Her work has been staged across the U.S., including at the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theatre in New York City, and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The study of animal behavior and her choreographic goal is to understand what makes us inherently human. She wrote her thesis on the evolution of art and storytelling in humans by looking at mating behaviors in birds. Her work is a continuation of this exploration into how and why we, as a species, tell stories and explore how our relatives in the animal kingdom can tell us about ourselves. Art and science are both ways of holding a mirror up to ourselves. Why we get such intense feelings of gratification from participating in and watching dance and why we have such a thirst to tell and consume stories are related questions that she suggests are at the root of what makes us human. This is Sarah's second CounterPointe creation.
Alejandra Seeber (1969, Buenos Aires) has been described as having "a dialogic" approach to painting, where intentions and chance procedures, failures and acceptances operate together without hierarchy. She uses painting as a medium capable of absorbing other surrounding media and influences, and as a way of stretching the conventional ideas of what a picture is. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Seeber has been living in New York City since 1999. She attended Prilidiano Pueyrredon School of Fine Arts in Argentina, the Beca Kuitca Studio Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, 2000. She had her first survey show at Malba, Buenos Aires, in a show with Leda Catunda: Fuera de Serie (one of a kind). Her work has been shown in solo and groups shows internationally, including presentations at Thyssen Museum, 2017; Madrid, Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2016; Mercosul Biennial, Brazil, 2009; Kunst Museum of Saint Gallen, Switzerland, 2010; Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, 2010; Malba (Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires), 2011; and S-files , El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2003. She has had solo shows at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, 2010 and galleries such as Sperone Westwater, NY, Hausler Contemporary in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, to name a few. Her work is represented in collections such as Collection Diana and Moises Berezdivin, Puerto Rico, Zabludowicz Collection , London, Rolf Ricke Collection, Eduardo Constantini Collection, Germany, Staaliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Malba and Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, among many others.
Photo by Kasai.NYC
JoVonna Parks is a Philadelphia native where she began her intense formal training in Ballet, Horton and Graham techniques. She attended Ailey/Fordham under the direction of Ana Marie Forsythe and graduated with her BFA in dance in 2012. Upon graduation she was invited to perform with John Mark Owen in John Mark Owen Presents…. In Requiem. She has had the pleasure of working with and performing works by Camille A. Brown, Ronald K. Brown, Donald McKayle, Hofesh Shechter, Robert Battle, Jill Echo and many others. JoVonna has also had the opportunity and pleasure to work with Ty Jones and The Classical Theatre of Harlem in their productions of MacBeth (soldier/ensemble), The Three Musketeers (Kitty/ensemble), Antigone (ensemble) and she served as dance captain production of A Christmas Carol in Harlem. JoVonna performed with Elisa Monte Dance under the direction of both Elisa Monte and Tiffany Rea-Fisher from 2014-2019. Whether performing or creating, she also teaches ballet, modern and contemporary techniques in the greater NYC and New Jersey area. Presently, she teaches at Essential Elements Dance Studio in Hazlet, NJ. She is currently a freelance dance artist in NYC with Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company, Clymove and Konverjdans. Her own creations have been performed at Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company: Solo Suites as well as the all female collaborative choreography festival CounterPointe in both 2019 and 2022. JoVonna is a recipient of the NYFA City Corps Grant as well as a recipient of the 2021/2022 UMEZ grant from the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture as choreographer in collaboration with Nite Bjuti.
Jeanne Verdoux is a French American mixed media artist focused on drawings and ceramics. She uses sustainable materials, draws using water soluble media on found papers and cardboards, and sculpts in natural clay. All her art pieces, whether two or three dimensional, are symbolic representations of ideas drawn from her personal iconography. Her field of research is the feminine body, an expression of her experience as a woman: daughter, wife, and mother. Jeanne Verdoux has received numerous grants and fellowships including NYSCA Artist Grant, City Artist Corps grant (NYC Department of Cultural Affairs),The Bronx Museum AIM program, New York Foundation for the Arts immigrant program, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space residency, The French Institute residency in Morocco, the French Ministry of Culture ‘Villa Medicis Hors-les-Murs’. She has had solo exhibitions at Magda Danysz Gallery (Paris) and Freedman Gallery (PA, US). Her work has been exhibited in many group shows in the US, Canada, France and China and reviewed in The New York Times, Huffington Post and Boston Globe. Jeanne Verdoux earned an MFA from The Royal College of Art (London) and a BFA from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués (Paris). She is an Associate Professor at Parsons The New School and at New York University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Photo by Rebecca Seow
Amanda Treiber is a principal dancer and choreographer at New York Theatre Ballet, where for the past fifteen seasons she has been featured in masterworks by Ashton, Cunningham, DeMille, Limón, Robbins, and Tudor, and has originated roles in premieres by Richard Alston, Gemma Bond, Nicolo Fonte, Antonia Franceschi, and Pam Tanowitz. Ms. Treiber’s choreographic debut “Wind-Up” with music by RyanAnthony Francis premiered in NYTB’s Lift Lab Live in April 2021, and received critical acclaim. Ms. Treiber was awarded a NY City Artist Corp grant in 2021, giving opportunity to create “Mesmers” and establish a relationship with composer Phyllis Chen. In the Summer of 2022, she attended a residency at Sky Hill Farm Studio to begin the creation of “A Woman’s Reason” with a newly commissioned score by Lauren Vandervelden. Additionally, Ms. Treiber has appeared with Gemma Bond Dance, Co•Lab Dance, David Gordon’s Pick Up Performance Company, Tom Gold Dance, on television in FX’s Pose, and in the Park Avenue Armory's production of De Materie. Other honors include performing in the 11th Annual Classical Ballet Gala in Managua, Nicaragua, 15th Festival Internacional de Ballet de Trujillo, as well as the ribbon cutting ceremony for Blake's Barn at Jacob's Pillow.
Marcy Rosenblat is a visual artist whose paintings create the illusion of patterned fabric enveloping the surface of the canvas. Much of the painting’s content is determined by the interplay between the forms and the surface pattern. Enigmatic shapes blur the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, positing a kind of internal/external debate within themselves, as well as a larger meditation on form. Rosenblat’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, Most recently she had a solo exhibition at the Jason McCoy Gallery, NY (online) and was included in Salon Zurcher, 11 Women of Spirit, Zürcher Gallery, NY, a two person at 490Gallery, Brooklyn and a solo show at Blend Studio, Nashville, TN. Other exhibitions include: the Rawls Museum, Fordham University, Galerie Berlin am Meer, Germany, Smith College, Salisbury University, The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kouros Gallery, Frumkin Gallery and Kathryn Markel Fine Arts. Ms. Rosenblat received an artist’s grant from the Women’s Art Development Committee in 1998. She was born in Chicago Illinois and received her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Brooklyn NY.
Eryn Renee Young is a New York City-based choreographer and the Artistic Director and Founder of XAOC Contemporary Ballet, a neoclassical ballet company founded in 2010.The name XAOC (pronounced zay-ock) is derived from the Greek ‘χαος,’ which means ‘chaos’ and implies explosive creation. It is meant to portray the spirit of the company as they move ballet into the future, while maintaining strong ties to classical form. XAOC operates under the belief that there is room for ballet to evolve into the 21st century, led by women with a vision of inclusivity, generosity, inventiveness, spirit, humanity, and love. In addition to her position as founding artistic director and resident choreographer of XAOC Contemporary Ballet, Ms. Young is an inaugural choreographic fellow of the Jacob’s Pillow Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship, a 2018 resident choreographer of the UNCSA Choreographic Institute, and a 2017 resident artist of Dance at Socrates in Queens, NY, among others. Her choreography, which has been described as “dynamic... pulsing... [with] a fine sense of exploring space and a knack for visual polyphony,” has been showcased and commissioned across the NYC metro area. She has been commissioned by Columbia Ballet Collaborative, Eryc Taylor Dance, and nine times by Norte Maar for their CounterPointe series celebrating women making work on pointe in collaboration with female visual artists!
Born in Missoula, MT in 1976, Amanda Browder received an MFA/MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives in Brooklyn, producing over 25+ large-scale fabric installations all around the world. Amplifying multiple voices, she collaborates with local community groups and sources her textiles from local donations. Exhibitions include: Triennale Brugge, Project 1: ArtPrize; SPRING/BREAK Art Fair; Nuit Blanche Public Art Festival/LEITMOTIF Toronto; Dumbo Arts Festival; CounterPointe; White Columns, NYC; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo. Published in Unexpected Art: Chronicle Books and Strange Material; Arsenal Pulp Press. She received her first NEA grant in 2016 with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, and 2021 NYSCA/NYFA artist fellow. Artist in Residence: UNLV Las Vegas and Erie Arts & Culture. Photos and reviews have appeared in New York Times to Fiber Art Magazine and founder of art podcast www.badatsports.com.
