Leah Stein Dance Company

Leah Stein Dance Company is excited to share our immersive event:

OPEN PAGE

September 25th, 3 pm -6 pm. Leah Stein Dance Company needs your support to pay our artists and organizers!

LSDC is raising funds to pay the artists and organizers behind Open Page and needs your support! With your donation, LSDC can continue to create more equitable collaborations and sustain the LSDC ecosystem.

OPEN PAGE features indoor and outdoor performance, video, and conversation with local artists Caitlin Green, Crux, Shannon Brooks, Leah Stein, and Toshi Makihara inside and outside the Art Room Studio - our South Philly home. LSDC will also introduce our new collaborative research project, carry with you this place.

We work directly with our artists throughout their creative process by facilitating artist-to-artist collaboration, sharing studio access and paying our artists and organizers! Your donation will directly fund the creative and organizational labor behind Open Page -we hope you donate today!

Get tickets for Open Page here: https://fringearts.com/event/open-page/

Read more information on Open Page and the artist below:

WHAT: Open Page, an immersive gathering of performance and video

WHEN: Sunday, September 25th 3:00-6:00pm

WHERE: The Art Room Studio + Parking Lot, 2329 S. 3rd Street, Philadelphia, 19148

Open Page uses a fluid structure with space to mingle with artists, participate in deep listening, and witness works from local artists.

Caitlin Green: Our Embodied Impulses - PREMIER

Our Embodied Impulses is an exploration of the ways we reach beyond and through singular roles, identities, and archetypal expressions of self, by utilizing the body as a means of learning our capacity for doing and being. What is the body's role in reminding us of our multitudes and our reaches? (re-)Connection to self and each other has been the groundwork of this endeavor and a foundation for creative process. Collaborators entered the project in their individual spaces using movement scores that invited them into introspection via journaling and dance; then joined in a series of convenings to share and discuss what came up. At this short film premiere you’ll witness the collective movement narratives born from a merging of our personal movement processes. Meet us at our intersection.

Featured artists and collaborators include dancers: Amalia Colon-Nava, Sierra Cribb, Camille Halsey, Paloma Irizarry, Sophiann Moore, Chloe Newton; videographer/editor: Terrell Halsey; & musicians: Michael Anthony & Mobey Irizarry.

Crux: Species Study

An expressive evaluation of deep-rooted trauma. An act of alchemy entwining dance & music. An exploration of what links the hips of huemanity together.

LSDC: carry with you this place

A small group of local artists exploring intergenerational collaboration, dialogue and improvisation grounded in the question What do I/we carry?

Featured artists:

Kimya Jackson

Shannon Brooks

Leah Stein

Shannon Brooks: how to see in the dark

Improvised movement and sound performance using objects, people, vibrations, echoes, memories, and intuition to see in the dark.

What we don't see, what we miss, what we think we see, what we sense, funny feelings, what we run into, what we tip over, what we are surprised by, ghosts, white canes, step-ball-change, the edges of our capacity.

Leah Stein and Toshin Makihara: Improvisation

Toshi Makihara and Leah Stein, collaborators for over three decades, will share an improvised duet in movement and sound.

About the Artists

​​Caitlin Green

Caitlin Green is a Philadelphia-based freelance dance artist with a Master's degree in Dance/Movement Therapy from Drexel University (2019). In her work, she tends to concentrate on the body's role in wellness, individuality, and expressions of personal and collective narratives. As a freelance dance artist, Caitlin has choreographed and co-created works featured in Philly Fringe Festival, RAW Artist showcase (Baltimore), EMERGE Earthdance multidisciplinary artist residency, and the Painted Bride Art Center’s artist residency, Building Bridges. Caitlin is a teaching artist with arts organizations such as Dancing Classrooms, and BuildaBridge. She enjoys working collaboratively and with youth, as well as choreographing works that start conversation and inspire self-reflection.

Crux

Crux is a Jersey-born performance artist. She recently graduated from Temple University’s undergraduate dance program. Currently, she is a teaching, performing, and choreographic artist, as well as a marketing and program associate throughout Philadelphia. She is the founder of Forbidden Fruit, a curatorial collective bridging the gap between artistic communities globally. Crux approaches art as a universal language with which humxnkind can heal on individual and collective levels.

Shannon Brooks

Shannon Brooks is a multidisciplinary artist working in movement, video, and performance.. As a blind person, their work expands physical sight to include all the senses, memories, ghosts, vibrations, funny feelings, echoes and intuitions. Shannon uses performance and movement to explore the edges of our capacities and the Disabled body as an archive of joy and oppression. Shannon is the recipient of a 2021 Leeway Art for Change Grant, a Velocity Fund grantee and a founding member of Hook&Loop - a collective led by Disabled artists in Philadelphia.

Toshi Makihara

Toshi Makihara studied drums, percussion and improvisation with Sabu Toyozumi, a prominent percussionist in Tokyo. Since arriving in the United States, he has worked with various new music ensembles as well as with numerous dance and theater companies internationally. Makihara has worked with Joel Thome's WORLD SOUND, and provided original music to Arden Theater Company, Diversions Dance Company (Wales), Pennsylvania Ballet, ZeroMoving Dance Company, Merian Soto / Performance Practice, Leah Stein Dance Company and Zornitsa Stoyanova's Here[begin] Dance Company. Over the years, he has worked with musicians including Steve Beresford, Peter Brotzmann, John Butcher, Nels Cline, Eugene Chadbourne, Tom Cora, Amy Denio, Thurston Moore, William Parker and John Zorn. He has also collaborated with poets, visual artists, filmmakers and performance artists widely. Since the fall of 2000, Makihara has been focusing on three separate performing styles: 1. New Jazz performances on a conventional drum-set, 2. music for theater and dance using a variety of percussion and discovered sound media, and 3. the experimental free improvisation using a simple setting consisting of one snare drum and one small cymbal. Makihara's recordings include Grammy nominated "Another Shining Path" (1998 Drimala Records) in trio with Gary Hassay (alto saxophone) and William Parker (bass), and "Hurricane Floyd" (Spring 2000, Sublingual Records) in trio with Thurston Moore (guitar) and Wally Shoup (alto sax). He received Pew Fellowship in 2013.

Leah Stein

Leah Stein is the artistic director and founder of Leah Stein Dance Company, now in its 20th Anniversary Season, is originally from the Hudson Valley New York and has been living and making dances in Philadelphia for three decades. Her work has been performed extensively in the local area and in galleries, theaters, museums, outdoor sites, across the US and internationally in Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Romania, Mexico, Japan, and Scotland. Among her major works are collaborations with composers Pauline Oliveros (Urban Echo), David Lang (battle hymns), and Byron Au Yong (Turbine), all involving Mendelsohn Club Chorus under the direction of Alan Harler. Among her recent small scale site works are Adjacent Spaces, Bellows Falls, Portraits and Interior with musician Diane Monroe. She has been awarded grants from Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the Leeway Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Choreography, and Independence Foundation Fellowship. Stein was awarded a Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. In 2014, LSDC engaged in a yearlong research project guided by composer Pauline Oliveros; An inquiry into forging an improvisational, compositional practice for voice and movement. Stein was a 2018 Pew Fellow. She received a MacDowell Fellowship in 2019 where she began research on a new solo work “Secondary Succession”. Stein is a passionate educator and has worked with young people throughout the Philadelphia region and developed an annual residency program creating site-specific performance works at magnet high school Science Leadership Academy. Stein has taught extensively in the area and held a full-time Guest Artist Visiting Professor position at Drexel University in 2014. She offers ongoing open workshops in Voice/Movement practice. Leah Stein Dance Company moved to its new home in 2017, The Art Room Studio, in the heart of South Philadelphia.

About Leah Stein Dance Company

Now in its 20h year, Leah Stein Dance Company creates site-specific performances that evoke and illuminate the living histories of built and natural spaces. Working in close collaboration with cross-disciplinary creative artists, Stein stirs new perspectives about the interactions between people, their communities, and the physical environment. LSDC has created work for major sites throughout the region, including the Fairmount Water Works, Eastern State Penitentiary, Longwood Gardens, Christ Church Burial Ground, and Bartram’s Gardens, among others. LSDC has performed in Poland, Romania, Japan, Scotland, and across the US. From 2006-2015 LSDC undertook major collaborations with the Mendelssohn Club Chorus under the direction of Alan Harler. Recent collaborative projects Leah Stein Dance Company maintains active outreach programs for youth, seniors and dance communities in open Voice/Movement workshops. To learn more visit www.leahsteindanceco.org

About The Art Room Studio:

The Art Room Studio is Leah Stein Dance Company’s home space for rehearsals, performances, and events with regular programming open to the public. Housed in the former art room of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel School, this unique space is part of a historic campus and branch of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The cathedral and school building occupy a full city block in the Snyder Avenue section of South Philadelphia, firmly rooting its position as a pillar of the neighborhood since 1918. We are building on the existing programs which include supporting artists through Studio Works Series, REAP residency, the Open Page research group, Workshops in Deep Listening Voice/ Movement improvisation, and our economically accessible rental and community membership programs.

More information about these programs can be found at https://www.leahsteindanceco.org