"The
Foundry is onto something that feels both real and true."
Dance Magazine, 2003
Alex
Ketley
Artistic
Director / Co-Founder
Alex
trained as a dancer at the Washington Ballet, the School of American
Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. In 1994 he moved to California
to join the San Francisco Ballet where he performed a wide range
of classical and contemporary repertory including the work of
William Forsythe, James Kudelka, and George Balanchine. In 1998
he left the ballet to co-found The Foundry in order to explore
his deepening interests in choreography, improvisation, mixed
media work, and collaborative process. In addition
to his initital years directing The Foundry, Alex worked for Alonzo
King's LINES Ballet as both a dancer and choreographer from 2000-2002.
With The Foundry he has created dance, installation, and video
pieces during residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts
(CA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (CA), The Yard (MA), ODC
Theater (CA), the Santa Fe Art Institute (NM), the Ucross Foundation
(WY), and the Taipei Artist Village in Taiwan. Independent
of his work with The Foundry, he has been a guest choreographer
at North Carolina School for the Arts and Florida State University,
and his work has received the National Choo-San Goh Award and
the inaugural Princess Grace Award for Choreography, as well as
awards from the Hubbard Street 2 National Choreography Competition,
and the International Choreographic
Competition of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur in Quebec,
Canada. In 2001 he began a relationship with Hubbard Street 2,
and created four pieces for the company that have been toured
internationally. For 2005 he received funding from the Creative
Work Fund and created his first systemic work, Syntax,
with California poet Carol Snow, funding from the Irvine Foundation
and created Lost Line which explored California's diverse
cultural and physical landscape through the
use of improvisation and video, and was commissioned from both
Jim Vincent for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Robert Moses
for his company KIN. In
2006 he was appointed Resident Choreographer at the San Francisco
Conservatory of Dance, and commissioned to create new work for
the dance departments at Stanford University and San Francisco
State University. In 2007 Ketley had
a residency at the
Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography in Florida, was
awarded a yearlong CHIME Grant/Residency to mentor with veteran
artist Charlie Moulton, created a new work
for Ballet Met's
30th anniversary program, and premiered a new Foundry project
exploring contemporary
Iranian poetry in collaboration with The
Translation Project's founder Niloufar Talebi. In
2008 Alex won 2nd Place in the BNC 21st Century National Choreography
Competition, and was commissioned to create new works in Arizona,
Ohio, Colorado, Seattle, and Chicago. In the Bay Area he created
a new Foundry piece called "Monument" for ODC's inaugural
"Local Heros" Festival, and also built a new work in
collaboration with Carol Snow for the countries premiere integrated
dance company, AXIS, in celebration of their 20th anniversary
season. The duet from this work won an Isadora Duncan Award and
was considered one of the Top Ten Bay Area Dance Performances
of 2008 by both Voice of Dance and the San Francisco Chronicle.
In
addition to a number of commissions, for 2009 Alex will return
to the Maggie
Allesee National Center for Choreography as a Choreographic Fellow
and is one of six choreographers to recieve a prestigious Gerbode-Hewlett
Commission to create the new work Theater-Irrelevant.
Click
here
to see a video of Alex's work.
Alex's
Resume
and
Headshot.
To
email Alex click here.
--------------------
Christian
Burns
Artistic
Director/Co-Founder
Throughout
the past fifteen years Christian has taught and performed a wide
range of work in various companies, schools and art centers throughout
the United States, Europe and Asia. His work has developed from
a background in professional ballet as well as fifteen years of
exploring the practice and presentation of Improvisation.
After
receiving his formal training from The School of American Ballet
he became a company member for the James Sewell Ballet and Alonzo
King's Lines Ballet. In 2007 he was a guest artist with The Forsythe
Company for the creation of the installation-performance EQUIVALENCE,
which was presented in Dresden Germany. In
1998 he co-founded The Foundry.
Christian performs internationally with some of the most accomplished
dance-improvisors, such as; Kirstie Simson, Katie Duck, Michael
Schumacher, Ave Karczag, Charlie Morrissey and Chris Aiken among
others. Additionally he has worked in visual and video media and
approaches dance as an extension of a greater interdisciplinary
body of expression.
Christian
has been awarded the Massachussetts Cultural Council Artist
Fellowship for Choreography, a McKnight Artist Fellowship
for Dancers, the Paula Citron Award for Choreography
from the Moving Pictures Festival and the National
Choo-San Goh Award for Choreography . His dance-video
work has been screened at the Impakt Festival in the
Netherlands, the Moving Works Festival in Canada,
Dutch National Television, the Roberta Beck Cinema
in New York and the Stuttgart Film/Winter Festival in Germany.
Christian has been an artist in residence at the Experimental
Television Center in New York and the Taipei Artist Village
in Taiwan. His choreographic work has been performed for the Walker
Art Center, the James Sewell Ballet, Alonzo King's Lines Ballet,
The Laban Center, Ballet Arts Minnesota, San Francisco Conservatory
of Dance, the Unmiversity of Michigan and Mt. Holyoke College.
In
2007 Christian co-founded, with three visual artists, the Parsons
Hall Project Space based in Holyoke Massachusetts. Parsons Hall
is an interdisciplinary arts center offering a residency program
and public presentations for visual art, installation and performance
work.
He
is an ongoing faculty member of the San Francisco Conservatory
of Dance and the Lines Ballet School.
Christian
Burns webpage:
www.christianburns.net
To
email Christian click here.
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