ABD Productions is the producing arm of Anne Bluethenthal & Dancers, a San Francisco-based multi-ethnic, multi-cultural modern dance company that is dedicated to the creation and production of new dance works, to excellence and activism in the arts, and to developing dance from and bringing it to a diverse community. Steeped in the movement training developed by Bluethenthal, their dancing is eloquent and grounded, embodying a feminist approach to dance and choreography. Bluethenthal is committed to cross-cultural collaboration and to creating dance that is women identified, spiritual, passionate, and inclusive of all its member voices. ABD also assists artists in the community by producing and presenting their work, and by providing fiscal agency services.

Artist Statement 1

Dance is my language.
It is eloquent and honest with the power to move, disturb, provoke, inspire, disrupt, elevate and alter.
My choreography is an offering, an attempt to speak something of the soul through movement.
My dances are lamentation, longing, suffering, desire, exuberance, irreverence, subversion, inquiry, rage, frustration, meditation, reflection, and explosion. As I create them, I look for the lyric and the narrative; I move from heartbreak and outrage; I seek sublimity, nuance, and disturbing beauty.
They are always molded from a sensual movement impulse, shaped through a vision and love of form, and performed with a reverence for the earth and the human body.

My work is strongly woman-identified, and culturally expansive and inclusive. I have a reputation as a dancer's dancer and a dancer's choreographer for my sheer love of lush, sensual movement and my insistence on making choreography in which movement is the primary vehicle of communication.
I am drawn toward collective artistic ventures in which my own talents are stretched, where I can be challenged by scale and by strong collaborators, and where we may rally our artistic efforts to maximize their impact.

At this point in my career, I want to use my skill, craft, and vision to make dances that deal with issues of social change. I want to create partnerships with local, national, and international communities in order to bring attention to important issues, to inspire activism, and to inject the possibility of transformation and beauty to even the most difficult subjects. Each project I undertake now involves a multifarious yet like-minded group of artists and activist collaborators, creating community around the work and the issues.

Artist Statement 2

I live between the lines, straddling worlds, dancing complexity and nuance. My gesture seeks the quiet mind where we create revolution. Refraining from the automatic, I interrogate hierarchy as it plays its power out in motion. I believe that dance is the birthright of all beings; that the body is a site of wisdom, knowledge, and imagination.
This is a womanist dance aesthetic that honors the sacred and the profane, the high and the low, the collective and the individual, the formal and the ordinary. I embrace my contradictions as the deliciousness of what is. I believe in the possibility of the real in the face of overwhelming abstraction. I want to fight by yielding always to the necessary. Dance is my necessity.

I am a question, pushing toward the silenced with an ever-evolving language of movement.
I move on the edge, untying knots, turning emotion into sinuous movement thoughts.
I see obstacles, climb walls, grapple with treasures and reach toward the touch.
I am an explorer of breath inside the word.
I am sometimes a silent, soft creature, sometimes a dervish with spindly hands.
My questions expand into the sensuous, unearthing a disturbed quivering.
I am a conflict of textures, a stream flowing, a vine creeping, a violated web.
I dance the loosely evocative, swinging hearts from the intersections and wading through broken brambles.
I endure the anguished, beckoning "ahhh".

"... I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
... I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
- Mary Oliver

Anne Bluethenthal, M.F.A. is the founder and director of ABD Productions, the producing arm of Anne Bluethenthal & Dancers, a San Francisco-based multi-ethnic and multi-cultural modern dance company, dedicated to activism in the arts ABD was founded in 1984 and has developed a repertoire of more than 60 original works, including four evening-length multi-disciplinary pieces addressing issues such as Palestine-Israel, globalization, genocide, the environment, and the gift economy. ABD has received a number of notable awards and honors, including the San Francisco Chronicle's Best of 2001, San Francisco Weekly's Black Box, the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Goldie Award for Achievement in Dance, and the Rhinette Award for Best Choreography. Bluethenthal co-founded the SF Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival and created the Dancing the Mystery series.  She has been teaching her unique approach to dance technique for over 20 years and is currently on the faculties of California Institute for Integral Studies' Creative Inquiry MFA program, Academy of Art University's Motion Picture and Television program, and Institute for Transpersonal Psychology's Women's Spirituality MA program.  She maintains a private practice in the Alexander Technique (certified by both the North American and London Societies for Teachers of the Alexander Technique) and her writing on Dance, the Alexander Technique, and other subjects have appeared in various publications and books.

ABD Ensemble

Alyah Baker has trained and performed with Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Joffrey Ballet of New York, Oakland Ballet, Richmond Ballet, and Carolina Ballet. In 2003 she received a B.A. in Sociology with a Dance Minor from Duke University where she trained under former Joffrey Ballet principal Tyler Walters, and Clay Taliaferro, a long time principal dancer with  José Limón Dance Co., among others. She has been featured in works by Balanchine, Laura Dean, José Limón, and Alonzo King. She currently is a member of Dance Through Time and has been a member of ABD since 2004.




 

Laura Elaine Ellis maintains a non-stop career of performing, choreographing and producing. She is a principal dancer with Dimensions Dance Theater, and is co-founder and executive director of the African & African American Performing Arts Coalition, co-presenters of the Black Choreographers Festival: Here & Now.  Ms. Ellis has been a member of ABD since 1990.









Mayuko Hosoai, a native of Japan, was first introduced to modern dance at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2005. Subsequently earning her BFA degree in Dance, Mayuko taught at The Movement Center and performed with Convergence Dance Theatre, Honolulu Dance Theatre, Onium Ballet Project, and Tau Dance Theatre. In 2007, she was selected to spend one semester studying in a conservatory setting at London Contemporary Dance School. Spring 2008, upon graduation, Mayuko moved to San Francisco. She has had the pleasure of working with Dance/Theater Shannon, Here Now Dance Collective, Inochi Dance Project, RAWdance, and The Seams in the last few years. Mayuko currently is a member of Capacitor and this is her first season with ABD.  Photo by Joseph Seif




Chin-chin Hsu was born and raised in Taiwan. At the age of 5, she heard that dancers can fly in the air like butterflies, so she made a wish that one day she too could fly. She trained in ballet, modern, Chinese martial art, Chinese ballet, Tai-chi, improvisation while playing piano and violin. Chin-chin received her BFA with highest honors from New World School of the Arts, FL, under the direction of Daniel Lewis. In 2008, Chin-chin moved to SF and has danced with ODC/SF, Here & Now Collective, and is currently a member of Kunst-Stoff SF and Project B. This is her third season with ABD.


Mihyun Lee is an individual dancer and choreographer from Seoul, South Korea who is currently living in San Francisco. She studied Korean dance, ballet, contemporary dance, jazz, improvisation and yoga. She received her BA in Choreography from Kookmin University in 2005 in Korea and studied with Aesoon Ahn, Mina Yoo and others. She worked with Yoon Jin Kim Dance Company, YJK Dance Company, Dance circle 21 and Dean Moss. She was a part of the production of Kisaeng Becomes You in 2008 and 2009 in Korea, Hong-Kong and New York, which received great reviews from the New York Times. After she moved to the Bay area, she is focusing on contact improvisational dance and she works Punkkico Company and Liz boubion. This is Lee's first season with ABD. More information about her - Youtube: nannydancer

  


Sophia Chakos-Leiby completed her MFA in performance and choreography at Mills College in spring 2011, and strives to use dance as a tool for personal and social transformation. She has studied African Diaspora traditions, ballet, and modern at Mills and on full scholarship at the American Dance Festival, where she performed for the dance legend Diane McIntyre as part of the professional ADF showcase "Past/Forward". Sophia started dancing professionally with Amara Tabor-Smith's Deep Waters Dance Theater, and has also performed with Amen Santos' Do Brasil as part of the 2004 Grand Performances series in Los Angeles. Sophia presented choreography at Mills College, Shotwell Studios and Dance Mission Theater, as part of the Harvest Festival and Black Choreographer's Festival. 


Peiling Kao, a native of Taipei, Taiwan, and has been a freelance dancer for 14 years. After graduating from Taipei National University of the Arts in 1996 with a BFA in Dance, Peiling also worked as a full-time teacher at Cloud Gate Dance School in Taiwan. She has studied technique training in ballet, contemporary, various forms of modern dance, Chinese Traditional Dance, Chinese Martial Art, improvisation, and contact improvisation. In 2007, Peiling was awarded the Taiwan-England artists’ residency, hosted by the Independent Dance based at Siobhan Davis Studios in London. In 2010, Peiling finished her MFA in Choreography and Performance at Mills College, receiving an E.L Wiegand Foundation Award for excellence in performance and choreography. In the same year, she was also selected as an apprentice for ODC Theater. After her graduation, she taught at Mills College as a visiting artist. Among the artists/dance professionals that she worked with are: Mary Anthony, Molissa Fenley, Brenda Way, Anne Bluethenthal, Sonya Delwaide, Sean Curran, Ross Parkes, Hwai-Min Lin (Founder of Cloud Gate Dance Theater), Men-Fei Lo, Min-Shen Ku, Susan Van Pelt, Shinichi Iova-Koga, Nancy Lyons, Katie Faulkner, Rachel Berman, Alyce Finwall, Sheena Johnson and Joumana Mourad.
 

Frances Gay Teves Sedayao is a Philippine native who has been performing in the SF Bay Area for the past 12 years. She found and fell in love w/ martial arts & dance at CSU Hayward, & continued training at the Alvin Ailey School in NY. She has performed & toured since w/, artist-activist Pearl Ubungen, NUBA Dance, Amara Tabor-Smith, YC Movement Theatre (NY), Randee Paufve, Dandelion Dance, among many. As an independent artist, she has presented original works in the Bay Area, NY & Canada. Frances is a Serpent Source Grant Recipient & was honored as the Dance Featured Artist for 2003 Apature in SF. In 2007 she was awarded a New York Arts' Residency from Dance OMI International. She currently works as the choreographer for "A History of the Body" Project, performs with Nina Haft, Facing East Dance, & is enjoying her 10th year with ABD.

Shaunna Vella danced for the Civic Ballet of San Luis Obispo, CA from 1995-1999. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from St. Mary's College in 2003 where she double majored in Dance & Psychology, and was the recipient of the Louis LeFevre Award for Performing Arts. She currently teaches dance at St. Mary's College and Ace Dance Academy. She has taught at USF, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, Volee Dance, and at public schools around the Bay Area through Young Audiences. Shaunna continues to dance for local companies such as: Liss Fain Dance, Paufve Dance, Agora Dance Project, Dance Ceres and Davalos Dance Company. In 2007-2008 she served as an active artist for the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee. Her choreography has been seen at ODC Theater, Dance Mission Theater, The Garage and The Ashby Stage. In addition to being an artist and teacher, she currently works for the Jewish Community Federation. Previously, Shaunna worked for other social justice agencies including the Tides Foundation, and The Family Violence Prevention Fund. This is her first season with ABD.





Collaborating Artists
Remy Charlip, dancer, choreographer, designer, writer, actor, artist, and teacher, began dancing and teaching in 1949. From 1950 to 1961 Remy was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, performing as well as designing costumes and posters. He danced with Charles Weidman, Jean Erdman, and Donald McKayle and was director and performer with the Living Theater company. In 1958 he co-founded the Paper Bag Players, a children's theatre in New York. From 1964 to 1970 he worked as choreographer, designer, performer, and director with the Judson Dance Theater. He wrote and directed two plays as director of the National Theater of the Deaf and has made more than 200 dances, either for his own company or for others. He has illustrated and written more than two dozen children’s books. In 1972 he initiated his ‘air mail dances’, a series in which he sent out sketches of positions in the dance and asked contributors to link them together in whatever way they wished. For each work he would supply from 20 to 40 sketches (Dance in a Wingchair is one of these). These dances, some of them performed by up to 250 people, have been staged in Europe, S. America, Australia, and America.

Mama CoAtl Mexican Artivist, Songstress, Performance Artist lives in Tepoztlan, Mexico and San Francisco, CA. Her new CD BorderCrossingDiosa fuses blues with traditional Latinamerican soundscapes creating an edgy urban sound. Her lyrics deal with the grit of border life, the plague of femicide and humanity's plight for
redemption

Carolyn Cooke’s short story collection, The Bostons (Houghton Mifflin), was a winner of the PEN/ Bingham Award and a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly and in several volumes of Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is on the core faculty of the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies

Anne Carol who calls her music "elemental enchantment with a rock edge" comes from the lineage of Patti Smith, texturing song and spoken word with sampled beats, punk rhythms, and alluring melodies.  www.annecarol.com

Cassandra Carpenter (Costume Designer) has designed in the Bay Area for over 10 years.  For ABD Dance her projects include Tears of Rock and Global Heart.  Cassandra owns and operates an independent costume studio, CMC & design, where she has built costumes for theatrical and commercial clients including SF Ballet, Smuin Ballet, Baz Lurman’s La Boheme and Irving Berlin’s White Christmas. Her Theatre credits include American Conservatory Theatre, The Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Aurora Theatre, The Magic Theatre, Marin Theatre Co., Word for Word, Thick Description, Center Rep and San Jose Rep.

Matthew DeGumbia’s free associative nature has led him to production and design work with an extensive list of performance artists and choreographers including Sara Shelton Mann, Bill T. Jones, Anna Halprin, Tomi Paasonen, Krissi Keefer, & Alonzo King among numerous others. He has created a multimedia installation addressing human consumption and waste that was viewed at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, designed the video projections for the opening ritual and ceremony of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and was honored to be able to create the retrospective on the life of Harvey Milk, for the 30th anniversary celebration of the life of MILK. Matthew has toured extensively, and created installations in North America, Europe, & Asia. He has had the fortune to bring his work to audiences in every type of venue from the middle of the desert at Burning Man to New York City's Lincoln Center Festival.

Singer-songwriter Melanie DeMore weaves the fibers of African American folk with soulful ballads, spirituals and original music. In addition to her recordings, her Sound Awareness program has been presented in prisons, schools and youth organizations through-out the US and New Zealand. DeMore was a California-Artist-in Residence with the Oakland Youth Chorus as a conductor for 10 years, Musical director/conductor for the Bay Area Woman's Chorus and currently teaches at St. Paul's School in Oakland, CA. She is a featured presenter for SpeakOut's Institute for Social and Cutural Change and is a founding member of the Grammy-nominated vocal ensemble-Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir.

In a lighting design career that spans three decades, Stephanie Anne Johnson has designed shows for Cultural Odyssey, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Arizona Repertory Theater, La Mama Theater (N.Y.) Black Moon Theatre (Paris), Dimensions Dance Theater and ABD Productions. Her lighting design work has been seen in India, The Netherlands, Italy, France and Belgium. As a visual artist she has exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, De Young Museum, Jewish Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and Intersection For The Arts. Ms. Johnson is the Co-Chair of the Visual and Public Art Department at CSU, Monterey Bay. Ms. Johnson's visual art and design work can be seen on her website: www.lightessencedesign.com.

Robert Henry Johnson, a native San Franciscan, is a nationally renowned choreographer and performer.   Mr. Johnson has mounted ballets on Bavarian State Opera Ballet, Ballet British Columbia, Oakland Ballet, Santa Barbara Dance Theater, Oregon Ballet Theater School and Lines Ballet Pre Professional Program. He has danced with Oakland Ballet, ODC/San Francisco, Zaccho Dance Theater, Minnesota Dance Theater, Santa Fe Opera, Citicentre Dance Theatre and the Asian American Dance Collective. In 1993, he formed the Robert Henry Johnson Dance Company (RHJDC), is the recipient of 2001 Bay Area Critics Circle Award, Stolichnaya 1966 Arts and Achievement Award for Contemporary Dance, 1995 Goldie Award for Choreography, 1993 and 1992 Izzie Awards for Performance. Robert is also an accomplished playwright. His play The Othello Papers will be featured in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, July 18 and July 26 at the Magic Theater.
 

Karen Krolak is a Boston based choreographer, performer, costume designer, teacher, and writer. Since 2000, she has been the Founder/Artistic Director of Monkeyhouse (www.monkeyhouselovesme.com), an award winning nonprofit that connects communities to choreography. Her work has been presented at First Night 2009, the Cool NewYork Dance Festival 2009, DIVAFest 2003, and fringe festivals in New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Winnipeg. Last year she took her work to Italy, danced in David Parker’s Nut/cracked, and was invited to the Jacob’s Pillow Choreographers’ Lab (where she met Anne Bluethenthal). A faculty member at Impulse Dance Center in Natick, MA, in 2005, she co-taught workshops in Malpils, Latvia with her husband and favorite collaborator, Jason Ries.

Marc Ream, composer in residence with San Jose Dance Theater spent 12 years with George Coates Performance Works. His music has been performed in theaters and festivals nationally and internationally. Ream has been the recipient of numerous awards including those from the American College Theater Festival, Fromm Music Foundation, 4 Bay Area Critics Circle Awards, and a Black Box Award (for Bluethenthal's Broken Open). Classically trained, Ream's current style is to provide a computer/synthesizer texture within which live instrumentalists and vocalists interact. Unsing the Song is his eleventh collaboration with ABD.

Judy Grahn, PhD is a longtime activist and artist, co-founder of Gay Women's Liberation and a women's press. Her poetry and other writing are considered foundational to a number of movements, and have spread internationally for 30 years. Book length poems The Queen of Wands and The Queen of Swords have both been produced as plays; Wands won an American Book Award in 1983. Her collected poetry, The Work of a Common Woman was named in Publisher's Weekly as one of the 20 most influential women's books of the 70's & 80's. People continue to put her work to music and perform it in venues from Tasmania to Wisconsin; and to teach it from the Amazon Forest and the mountains of Chile to the Maharaja's College of South India and the universities of Austria. link

Allen Willner has worked as a lighting, visual and set designer in the Bay area and New York City since 1998. His direction and design of inkBoat’s “Heaven’s Radio”(2003) received 4 Isadora Duncan Dance Award. He was nominated for Isadora Duncan Dance Awards for the “Visual Designs” of The Esp Project’s “51802” (07) and inkBoat’s “Cockroach”(’01) and received a Dean Goodman Choice Award in 2000 for his lighting design of Ingabor Weinnman’s post-holocaust play “Don’t Look, Don’t Ask”. Past collaborators include The Erika Shuch Performance Project, The Rova Saxophone Quartet, Deborah Slater Dance Theater, Ed Purver and Sara Kraft, Paige Sorvillo, Motion Lab, Shinichi Iova Koga and inkBoat, The Shotgun Players, Scott Wells and Dancers, Nanos Operetta, and Carla Kihlstedt.

As director of Dance Mission Media, Joey Williams has worked with ABD Productions, Zaccho Dance Theater, Dance Brigade, Mark Foehringer Dance Project, and Alayo Dance Company. Joey Williams is creative at VideoDa of which he produces ARTS ALIVE! San Francisco airing on local cable TV and is founding chair of Berkeley Digital Video/Film Consortium. Formerly lighting designer for Anne Bluethenthal credits include "The Heart is a Live Thing", five years of the Lesbian/Gay Dance Festival, and countless others.

Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing and sampling technology. Processing her live voice through “MAX MSP” software on a MacBook Pro, she creates solo works that combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. She often uses custom MIDI controllers such as Ed Severinghaus’ BodySynth™ or Donald Swearingen’s Light SensePod, which allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in flexible black-box venues and proscenium halls. In addition to her performance work, she has a growing body of inter-media works including multi-channel sound and video installations– some solo, and some involving visual collaborators

Ajayi Lumumba, infuses his jazz-rooted music with Western Classical and Urban styles and folkloric traditions of Africa and the Diaspora. Jackson is an accomplished jazz bassoonist, percussionist, and pianist and has performed and composed music throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan, Africa and the Caribbean. Jackson has performed and recorded artists such as Prince Lashaw, Adam Rudolph, John Santos, Omar Sosa, and many more. He has worked with a dance ensembles including Dimension Dance Ensemble, Ase Dance Collective, Imhotep, and Project Reconnect. Jackson directs his own Haitian folkloric company, Neg Diaspora, and is co-founder of Pitch Perfect, a Bay Area-based production house specializing in film score and commercial music.

AWARDS & HONORS

Best of 2001 for Tears of Rock, SF Chronicle
1998: Black Box Award for Best Music Score (Marc Ream) for Broken Open, SF Weekly
1997: Nominee, the Herb Alpert Award for Choreography
1996: Goldie Award for Achievement in Dance, SF Bay Guardian
1989: Rhinette Award for Best Choreography for Queen of Swords, Theater Rhinoceros

GRANTS

The Zellerbach Family Fund, 1985-present
SF Hotel Tax Fund, SF Grants for the Arts, 1987-present
San Francisco Arts Commission, Cultural Equity Grant, 1998-2000 & 2004
The Horizons Foundation, 1998 – 2000
Gateway Fund, 1999
The San Francisco Foundation, 1989