Meet the choreographers and artists of CounterPointe11
This March, Norte Maar brings forth CounterPointe11, 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 1-3, 2024. Tickets here.
We are pleased to introduce the seven CounterPointe11 choreographers and their collaborating artists:
photo: Rojin Shafiei
Tina Bararian is a modern dancer, choreographer, actor, and film director, holding degrees in Film Studies from York University and Dance Performance from George Brown College. After obtaining her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance at York University, Tina relocated to New York City to further her studies at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. In 2023, she established her own dance company in New York and premiered her first piece, 'Not Here,' at Spoke The Hub residency, where she received the People's Choice Artist award. Tina is the visionary curator and founder of "Dancers Of Iran," a global artistic project and platform dedicated to showcasing dancers of Iranian descent.
Estefania Velez Rodriguez was born in Mayaguez Puerto Rico and her paintings and videos are a visual study of her relationship to the many worlds that surround her. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and goes back to Puerto Rico every few years. During the Pandemic she also lived a short while in Mexico City. She has been thinking about language as a dual tongued individual and how symbolic language of painting acts as a bridge between many cultures and spaces. Her artistic practice mostly involves painting on canvas and paper, and also includes experimentation with video formats in painting. Painting has taken a turn towards abstracted landscapes as well as non-objective paintings that are somewhat open field and bright. Teaching has shifted her painting language and theory. She finds experimentation more important and abstraction necessary to embody fleeting emotions, times, and broader discourses. Through performance and video she builds a physical relationship with the 2-dimensional painting and drawings that she makes. Each video illustrates dual feelings of inclusion and displacement. Because of this duality she aims to create objects and characters that contain a fluidity or neutrality of origin, probing both feelings of well-being and discomfort. It is in the tension between peacefulness and discomfort where she aims to break open a psychological space – a space capable of revealing a body identity and human condition that accepts humility and power.
Chloe Sonnet Brown is a dancer, choreographer, and ceramic artist based in New York City. She received her dance training at Pacific Northwest Ballet School, where she performed works by George Balanchine, Kent Stowell, and Eva Stone. Chloe holds a Certificate in Contemporary Dance from Alonzo King's Lines Ballet Training Program, where she performed works by Sidra Bell, Gregory Dawson, and Alonzo King. Chloe was a company dancer with Spectrum Dance Theatre from 2021-2023. Chloe’s foundational belief as an artist is that vulnerability is a superpower. She aims to cultivate collective empathy in her work as a dancer, choreographer, and person
Cadence Giersbach makes abstract sculptures and paintings inspired by her experiences as a gardener working with earth, rocks, and organic matter. Her interest is in the materiality of the landscape—its texture, weight, and gesture—and the associations it evokes. Sculptural shapes are reminiscent of living and geological formations and increasingly relate to ancient archetypes. She says of her work, “My intention is always to animate an object, to coax it into expressing the abstract story it contains.” Giersbach has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad and received awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting. One of her large-scale mosaics, commissioned by Arts for Transit, MTA, is on the ceiling of the Myrtle-Wyckoff Transit Station in Brooklyn, NY. Recent work has been exhibited at PS122, Satchel Projects, and High Desert Gallery. Her work is in the collections of The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Harvard Business School, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. She lives and works in New York City and Sullivan County, New York, where she also gardens.
Danielle Diniz is the Co-Artistic Director of Jazz Choreography Enterprises, recently was Artist in Residence at Tribeca BMCC via CUNY Dance Initiative and has choreographed for the Ailey BFA program, Jacob's Pillow, Columbia Ballet Collaborative, Stars of American Ballet, New York Dance Project, Ballet Hartford, Central Utah Ballet, Earl Mosley's Diversity of Dance and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, among others. She choreographed the musicals ‘My Way’ and ‘On the Air’, made her Off-Broadway choreographic debut at the AMT Theatre with 'An Unbalanced Mind,' presented work at the McCallum Theatre/Palm Desert Choreography Festival and the New York Theatre Barn Choreography Lab at BAC and was awarded a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts/City Artist Corps. She intermittently choreographs and assistant directs musicals for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy and has served as Associate Choreographer for Lorin Latarro and Hunter Foster. She will choreograph for St. Paul's ballet program and Ballet Hartford for a second time in 2024. She is a winner of the New York Dance Project Choreography Competition, a choreographic mentor for We Are Queens and enjoys teaching at Steps on Broadway, Peridance, Mark Morris and Manhattan Youth Ballet..
Carol Salmanson works with light and reflective materials to create installations, sculptures, and wall pieces. She is best known for her window installations, which have been seen in Russia, New York, and New Jersey. Salmanson also has an extensive solo, two-person, and group exhibition history throughout the United States and internationally. Her work has been shown in galleries and non-profit venues and artist run spaces such as SL Gallery, Guild Gallery II, PS122, FiveMyles, Storefront Bushwick, Dam Stuhltrager, Sideshow Gallery and others. She has curated and co-curated shows as well. Salmanson earned a B.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University and an M.B.A. in finance, accounting, and marketing from the University of Chicago. After working for a large corporation, she started a company which bought, renovated, and sold historic houses in Denver. She studied art in New York City at the Arts Students League, School of Visual Arts, and National Academy of Fine Arts’ Abbey Mural Workshop Fellowship program. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees for Independent Curators International, Smack Mellon, and the Hearing Health Foundation.
Julia K. Gleich has been making dances for over 20 years, investigating relationships between the traditional and contemporary with a focus on collaboration. In 2004 she co-founded Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts with Jason Andrew as a vehicle to create and present collaborations in dance and visual arts. After 15 years of teaching at dance conservatoires in London (Trinity Laban and London Studio Centre) she gave up institutional academia, returning to NYC to independent creation. Gleich Dances was produced at the JoyceSoHo for 2 seasons, has been in residence at the University of Buffalo and at The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore and has two artists retreats at Kaatbsaan in 2024. Gleich teaches at Peridance Center in NYC and is known for supporting new ideas in ballet. Book chapters about canon and the margins of ballet with collaborator Molly Faulkner, are published in (re:) claiming ballet and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet. In addition to her creative and scholarly work in dance, Gleich is a partner in Artist Estate Studio managing artist studios and estates, stewarding legacies and promoting artists.
Ellie Murphy's work references hair, crafts, folk art, and is also inspired by childhood memories of wind blowing through prairie grass or wheat. Recent pieces use polypropylene macramé fiber with other materials. Outside, the cord moves in the light and weather; indoors, the smaller wall sculptures explore unraveling and fluffiness. Trying to make physical the rhythm and repetition at the heart of ordinary life inspires this question, “how does one individual strand work in relation to the whole fabric of society?”She lives in Queens, grew up in Kansas, and studied sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis and Yale. In addition to Norte Maar, Ellie has shown her work at Hudson Valley MOCA, Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery, ArtPort Kingston, Franconia Sculpture Park, Outpost Artists Resources, Drawing Rooms, Salina Art Center, and The Usdan Gallery at Bennington College.
Minnie Lane (she/her) is a choreographer, writer, and content creator. Minnie's choreography focuses on queering ballet partnering and strives to both draw on and expand upon classical ballet technique. Minnie is the Associate Director of QueerTheBallet. She strives to create dialogue about issues in the ballet field and uses social media to make dance scholarship accessible and interesting. Minnie and her social media content has been featured in the New York Times, Jezebel Magazine, and Pointe Magazine.
Jaanika Peerna is an Estonian-born visual and performance artist living and working in New York since 1998. Her works often deal with the theme of transitions in light, air, water and other natural phenomena. For her Glacier Elegy performances she often involves the audience in participatory reflection on the current climate meltdown. Her art practice stems from the corporeal experience of our existence and reaches towards enhanced awareness of the fragility, interconnectedness and wonder of all life. She has exhibited her work and performed extensively in the entire New York metropolitan area as well as internationally. In 2023 her Glacier Elegy performance was part of State of the Arts Night at HIRSHHORN museum in Washington DC. Her work is in numerous private collections in the USA and Europe and is part of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris. Peerna’s work is represented by JHB Gallery in the US, ARTROVERT in Europe and IdeelART globally. In Fall 2021 a new monograph Glacier Elegies was published by Terra Nova Press (distributed by MIT Press).
Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon is a New York City based choreographer and graduate from Barnard College of Columbia University where she combined her interests in evolutionary biology with storytelling and dance. She was raised in Paris, France where she trained in ballet at the Académie Américaine de Danse de Paris from 2005-2015. She then moved to San Francisco and 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. Her mentors include Claudia Schreier, Alonzo King, and Abdul Latif. Her thesis researched 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 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 a thirst to tell and consume stories are related questions that are at the root of what makes us human. This is Sarah’s third CounterPointe creation.
Nancy Bowen is a mixed media artist known for her eclectic mixtures of imagery and materials in both two and three dimensions. Her sculpture and drawing exist in an in-between zone of form and idea, of abstraction and representation. Her work offers a poetic commentary on our quickly changing material culture. Like an artistic archeologist in this age of globalization and post-industrialization, she salvages (often disappearing) ornament and craft traditions and incorporates them into sculpture and drawings.Bowen has shown widely in the United States and Europe. She has won awards from the NEA and NYFA and she received an Anonymous Was a Woman Award among others. She has had residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Jentel and the Dora Maar House. Most recently she published a collaborative book with the poet Elizabeth Willis called “Spectral Evidence: The Witch Book”. She is currently a Professor of Sculpture at Purchase College, SUNY. She maintains a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Nicole Speletic, PhD is a dance artist and philosopher and native New Yorker. She brings philosophical perspective into dance technique – so movement has meaning and purpose. She integrates physicality into theoretical study, so concepts are embodied and grounded. A core of philosophical and societal issues – individual autonomy, societal oppression of groups, challenges of the human condition and the hopeful search for meaning and joy - are central in works she performs and creates. She performed her own works and others’ in New York City; Washington DC, The Netherlands, Slovenia, Croatia and Vietnam – on stages, but also in a cemetery, a city square, and at a refugee camp. Dr. Speletic has been especially inspired to work as co-director of N/N Dance Collaborative, and with Born Dancing, Robin Becker Dance ‘Into Sunlight’, and the Table of Silence project. Humanistic Humphrey-Limon dance infused her early training, where she became an apprentice with the Limon Dance Company and Associate Director of the Professional Study Program. Her current interests range across modern and contemporary dance to ballet, both classical and contemporary. Dr. Speletic teaches dance to adults at colleges in New York (NYU, LIU, SUNY Nassau) and as a guest at schools in Europe. She is excited and appreciative for the opportunity to participate in this program with Norte Maar.
Esperanza Mayobre is a Brooklyn-based artist that grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. She has exhibited at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Cornell University, the Fuller Craft Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museo Eduardo Sivori Buenos Aires, the Queens Museum, The State University of New York Westchester Community College, La Caja Centro Cultural Chacao Caracas, the Bronx Museum, Hallwalls, MIT Cavs, BRIC, The Art Museum of the Americas Washington D.C., the Contemporary Museum of El Salvador, the Incheon Biennial Korea. She is a recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency, the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant, the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Smack Mellon Studio Program, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been in Artishock, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Creative Time Reports, Arte al Día, Art Fo-rum and Art in America. She recently had a two-person exhibition at Baxter St. Camera Club.
Cherylyn Lavagnino earned an MFA in Dance under the mentorship of Lawrence Rhodes from New York University’s (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts, as well as a BA in Philosophy from the University of Southern California. Lavagnino’s professional dance career spanned worldwide as a soloist with the Pennsylvania Ballet, a principal dancer with Arizona Ballet Theatre, as well as a principal dancer with Ballet del Espacio in Mexico City under the direction of Michel Descombey. She has performed a range of classical repertoire and contemporary work by choreographers including George Balanchine, Jerome Robins, Jose Limon, John Butler, Hans Van Manen, Lynne Taylor-Corbett, Margo Sappington, John Butler, and Tere O’Connor. The diversity of these experiences has informed the dialogue between classical and contemporary in her work with Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance. Ms. Lavagnino is an Alpert Award nominee for choreography. Lavagnino has had successful commissions at Princeton University, Intermezzo Dance, Indianapolis City Ballet, Southern Methodist University, University of Utah, Repertory Dance Theatre, as well as recipient of a space grant residency from the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Lavagnino has secured a commission with the North Carolina School of the Arts’ Dance Department for the spring 2025 academic semester. Lavagnino served as Chair of the Dance Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts from 2006–2014 and as a full-time faculty member from 1987-2022. In recognition of her superior work, Lavagnino won NYU’s prestigious David Payne Carter Award for Excellence in Teaching (2003). Lavagnino served as Visiting Professor of Dance at the University of Utah for the 2021-2022 academic year. She teaches professional ballet locally in NYC and internationally, instructs summer residency programming, conducts class for the professional training program at Ballet Hispanico and company class for Abraham.In.Motion. She taught masterclasses in Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, and Prague, while enjoying a creative exchange with the Beijing Dance Academy and the Conservatory and Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Lavagnino received NYU's prestigious Global Research Institute grant for travel and research in Prague (2018). She recently participated in Canada’s National Ballet School’s Assemblée Internationale 2023.
Cherylyn Lavagnino has created over fifty in the past twenty-four years, and since 2000 the platform for her choreography has been Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance (CLD). Eleven exceptional artists make up CLD stemming from distinguished backgrounds and professional work experiences such as Twyla Tharp, Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Jose Limon Dance Foundation, Lucinda Childs, Shen Wei Dance Arts, and Miguel Guiterriez. The company supports a Live Music and Dance incentive by collaborating with composers Scott Killian and Martin Bresnick on new works, as well as performing alongside world-renowned musical artists such as Lisa Moore, Elly Toyoda, Ashley Bathgate, and New York City Ballet Orchestra members Derek Ratzenboeck and Cameron Grant. CLD has been presented in New York City and abroad: The New Festival in Beijing, Bryant Park, Danspace Project, The 92nd Street Y, Dance Theater Workshop, Symphony Space, DanceNow/NYC, Jacob’s Pillow, The Yard, Kaatsban International Dance Center, Indianapolis City Ballet, Intermezzo Dance, The Joyce Theatre’s “Evening Stars” series, and the Off the Grid Festival. The company also has a long history of performing in museum and gallery spaces such as Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Chelsea Art Museum, OK Harris Works of Art, and the James Cohan Gallery. CLD serves an annual residency with the Catskill Mountain Foundation which offers the community of Hunter, New York educational outreach enrichment and live performances. The company has been supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the O’Donnell Green Foundation for Dance and Live Music, the Harkness Foundation, the American Music Center’s Live Music for Dance grant, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Fund, the NYU Global Research Institute grant, and receives matching corporate funding.
Cherylyn Lavagnino will be sharing an excerpt from her upcoming work “The Winter’s Tale”
Lavagnino and Bresnick’s latest collaboration is based on one of William Shakespeare’s last great plays, The Winter’s Tale is a story of improbabilities, loyalty, love, and forgiveness. At times a comedy and others a tragedy, the plot resides in a patriarchal society in which the role of women is constantly thwarted and limited by male dominance. However, Shakespeare’s female characters contradict the gender mores of the period. These strong, grounded women display thoughtful judgment and compassionate morality. Utilizing gesture inspired by sign language, the movement vocabulary lends itself to the fervent emotional context displayed by the performers' embodiments of joy, madness, betrayal, jealousy, and passion. Several roles are portrayed by gender opposites to the original casting; Lavagnino utilizes this device to speak to the rich and interesting dimensionality of all people and urges the audience to lean into the acceptance of these differences to embrace the distinct expression of each individual.
