Alli Ross
|Founder
is a dance theater artist, choreographer, educator most curious about embodied HERstories. She is a founding member of Excavate, a performance collective, exploring interdisciplinary art making and community arts practice.
With the support of NEFA’s New England Dance Fund 2020, Danza’s Organica’s We Create Festival 2019, Studio 550’s Creative residency 2019, and as a CATALYST artist at the Dance Complex, Alli continues to expand Excavate while deepening the Bubbasafiss Project exploring ancestral legacy and change.
Favorite performance projects include Healing Wars in collaboration with choreographer Liz Lerman, the company and U.S. veterans. From 2009-2011, Alli worked with Punchdrunk on the award winning production of Sleep No More where she originated the role of Lady Macduff in both the American Repertory Theater and Emursive's NYC production.In Education, Alli is an Assistant Professor at The Boston Conservatory at Berklee in the Theater division where she teaches Movement for Actors, and Theater and Community Engagement, a course recognized for its bridges between higher education and local community. Learn more about Alli Ross and her work here: alliross.com
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Bess Paupeck|
Collaborator
is a curator-producer-artist and maker of experiences that forge connection to community, self, story, and our shared humanity. Bess lives and works in the Boston area and over the years has worked with many cultural institutions, including the Somerville Museum, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Science, the Somerville Arts Council, Harvard University and the Nave Gallery. Some areas of research have included storytelling, museology, and anti-racist methodologies and their lived practice.
Living life as a work-in-progress, a love for making, moving, performance building, arts production, curating and community engagement come together in the offerings she is so deeply grateful to create with Excavate.
Bess holds a Masters in Public Humanities from Brown University, graduate certificates in Museum Studies and Non-Profit Management from Tufts University and Harvard Extension School, and a BA in American Studies, Fine Art and Art History from George Washington University.
Sharon Kivenko
|Collaborator
is a scholar and performance artist whose research and art live at the intersections of performance, embodiment, and social belonging. Her work as an ethnographer, as a professor, and as a dance-artist moves distally from the body to consider the kinds of social encounters that influence and determine individual and communal being-in-the world. Sharon’s academic research joins conversations in dance studies, social anthropology, and gender studies that highlight the complex relations among arts production, labor, migration, and citizenship; relations that themselves illuminate how paying attention to somatic modes of being in the world reveal nuanced perspectives on race, gender, class and sexuality. Sharon holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and has taught in Anthropology, Music, and Dance Studies at Harvard University, Tufts University and Boston College. She is currently teaching a movement seminar on choreography and resistance in the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women and Sexuality at MIT. When not writing, teaching, or performing, Sharon enjoys baking bread and taking long woods walks with her 7 and 12 year old children. She divides her time between Somerville, MA (USA) and Sutton, Quebec (Canada).
Karen Lane Bray|
Collaborator
MFA Dance, MS Physical Therapy
I have been creating dance/theatre projects, indoors, and, out in nature, my entire life. Recent Community-Building/Dance Theatre projects I have conceived of, choreographed, and produced:
Site Specific Dances: June, 2021, The Fig Newton Garden Theatre Dancers created Site Specific Dances and performed them to a crowd of 155 outside in my garden, yard and driveway.
The Newton Project: Newton has a long, fierce battle going between residents who want regulations on leaf blowers and those who feel that any regulations are stepping on their freedoms. I invited people from both sides to an arts event; together we wrote poetry, danced, and made visual art. A lovely time was had by all and new friendships have been forged.
The Crystal Lake Community Dance Project - Newton residents celebrated our lake with dance, giant puppets and a collaboration of musicians calling out to each other across the lake. Arts Alive: My colleague and I improvise and interact with the public as a variety of comedic characters such as “Famous Authors, Dotologists, Oddiologists, Fortune Tellers, UPS Delivery folks, and, more…”
Do Business/Make Art: Seven dancers and I observed movement and visuals in three local Newton businesses; Cobella Beauty Salon, George Howell Coffee and Hip Stitch, and, choreographed, and, performed dances inspired by those businesses. The Artful Piano: Every Summer, Newton places artfully painted pianos all over Newton. Five dancers and I create structured improvisations inspired by each piano.Recent Teaching: Site Specific Dance: On zoom, prompts are given to students one week in advance of class to create One Minute Dances. During class, we share our creations and improvise together.
Creativity Lab: Since 2009, I have been co-teaching “Creativity Lab” at the New Art Center since 2009 to the present; a course that invites students to explore movement improvisation as well as all genres of art.
To pay the bills, I am self-employed as a Physical Therapist/Personal Trainer in clients’ homes, or, on Zoom in the greater Boston area.