"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.
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
Christian
relocated to Holyoke Massachusetts where he setting up a new base
for himself. He is currently co-developing a new project-space,
an artist residency center and performance space. Christian is
still acting as an artistic advisor to The Foundry as well as
directing and contributing to projects on an ongoing basis.
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. He teaches contemporary approaches
to ballet technique, contact and free improvisation and choreographic
coaching. His performance and choreographic work are an amalgam
of his classical and improvisational perspectives exploring the
impermanence of form.
Christian
began his training at the Pioneer Valley Ballet, where as a teenager
he was encouraged to start teaching and choreographing, and finished
his training at the School of American Ballet . He became a company
member of the James Sewell Ballet and the Alonzo Kings Lines Ballet.
Christian
studied the Improvisational Techniques of William Forsythe during
a five-month study period at the Ballett Frankfurt in 1997.
Additionally, he has studied for over fourteen years with some
of the world's foremost practitioner's of CI and Improvisation,
most notably: Kirstie Simson, Nancy Stark Smith, Chris Aiken,
Andrew Hardwood and Peter Bingham .
Christian
has been awarded the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Dancers
, the Paula Citron Award for Choreography from the
Moving Pictures Festival and a 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. 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 commissioned by James Sewell Ballet, The Laban Center,
Ballet Arts Minnesota, San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and
Mt. Holyoke College.
He
is also a part-time faculty member of the San Francisco Conservatory
of Dance.
Christian
Burns webpage:
web.mac.com/motionprocess
To
email Christian click here.
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