︎

 PDF   LINK 
 
Arts and Culture Texas September 2015 Lydia Hance, Artistic Director of Frame Dance Productions, Erica Gionfriddo, Artistic Director of ARCOS Dance, Joshua L. Peugh, Artistic Director of Dark Circles Contemporary Dance, Candace Rattliff, dancer in Vault and Hope Stone Dance Company, Courtney D. Jones, Houston Dance Collective Co-Founder and faculty at HSPVA. Photo by Lynn Lane.Contemporary Dance in Texas Talent, Training, Festivals & More Unlike Peugh, Anoult, and others, the trip to Texas was not a return for co-choreographers, Curtis Uhlemann and Erica Gionfriddo. When they made the decision to move their award-winning company, ARCOS Dance from Santa Fe, New Mexico, they actively searched nationwide for a new base city. The team settled on Austin because what they found was a community of dancers and audiences hungry for but not inundated with contemporary dance. ARCOS Dance will unveil The Warriors: A Love Story at Austin’s Rollins Studio Theater the weekend of Sept. 11-12. The production, which “confronts the disturbing beauty and profound devastation of war,” is inspired by the stories and reflections of ARCOS co-director and multimedia collaborator, Eliot Gray Fisher’s maternal grandparents. The work received outstanding reviews and Mervyn Stutter’s “Spirit of the Fringe” award as a result of its performance at Scotland’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2014. Locally, Gionfriddo and Uhlemann have quickly become denizens of the dance community, forging relationships with dance studios, high schools, the University of Texas, theater companies, and art galleries. However, the pair, along with Fisher, are infusing their own creative dynamic and connections as they soak in what Austin has to offer. “Our company and personal travels have taken us all around the country and internationally,” says Gionfriddo, “and the relationships we formed along the way have created a dynamic, diverse network that spans the globe.” Under their non-profit umbrella, ARCOS Foundation for the Arts, the company is committed to sharing resources and information through professional-level dance intensives, development workshops which frequently function as laboratories for independent artists, and initiatives such as their Dance Artist Development Award, designed to provide financial support for performers seeking to expand their personal practice through workshop or class opportunities in Austin. “The way audiences engage with the arts is changing, due in large part to technological innovations that are rapidly transforming our daily lives,” says Gionfriddo. “In order to address the root of the audience crisis to benefit the work we want to create, instead of focusing on competing for the limited resources available, we want to shift the character of the entire landscape. The more artists out there working to help audiences re-imagine this relationship, the better as far as we’re concerned, so we feel compelled to cultivate artists’ imaginations.”