Meet the Facilitators of Dance Exchange’s Online Winter Institute
After the success of our first ever online Summer Institute in August, we’re so excited to invite you to our first ever online Winter Institute, January 8-10, 2021. As part of our Organizing with Artists for Change Initiative (OAC), the 2021 Dance Exchange OAC Winter Institute will include live online movement classes (adapted for our home spaces) and workshops that delve into creative tools and practices from Dance Exchange as well as our peers and collaborators.
Who’s leading the Dance Exchange OAC Winter Institute?
The 2021 Winter Institute is led by Dance Exchange staff and artists as well as the partners and collaborators listed below.
Judith Bauer
After a lifetime of watching dance, Judith Bauer is happy to be participating in making dance happen. Judith began dancing fifteen years ago at age 70 as a way of dealing with health issues. While she has studied other forms, she is mainly interested in improvisational dance for its ability to keep one mentally sharp and focused on responding to others. She is enjoying the challenge of facilitating classes within virtual spaces. In addition to being part of the supportive community that is Dance Exchange, Judith is a member of Quicksilver, the senior dance company of Arts for the Aging. Quicksilver dancers—all over the age of 60— use improvisational forms to engage with frail seniors in day programs and residential facilities.
Tashi Gore
Tashi Gore is Associate Director at Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre as well as being Co-Artistic director of multi award winning Glass Performance. She works predominantly in socially engaged contexts making original performance as a director/facilitator and supports artists as a producer and consultant in Scotland and internationally.
Tashi makes biographical performance work inspired by the people she meets and the questions they have about the world. With Glass she co-founded young people’s performance collective Junction 25 at Tramway in Glasgow, and Polmont Youth Theatre at HMYOI Polmont, the first youth theatre in a Scottish prison. Junction 25 were the recipients of a CATS Whiskers for outstanding contribution to Scottish theatre in 2015. She has co-authored A Beginners Guide to Devising Theatre with long term collaborator Jess Thorpe that was published by Bloomsbury in September 2019.
Tashi is also a visiting lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and her work in higher education has led her to develop an interest in supporting artists’ development and providing a critical framework for the creation of new work. Tashi is a partnering artist with American company Dance Exchange and is a trainer and facilitator for the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process. She is also part of the Federation of Scottish Theatre CRP facilitators network.
Elizabeth Johnson Levine (Associate Artistic Director and Director of Partnerships at Dance Exchange)
Elizabeth Johnson Levine (EJ, she/her/hers) is a choreographer, dancer, and educator with a focus in socially engaged dance practices. Johnson connects communities through choreography, creating dance that promotes civic dialogue, and designing participatory experiences that apply artistic practices in multiple contexts. She has a particular interest in working with youth and elders, developing embodied structures for science learning, and promoting leadership development through the arts.
Johnson holds a B.A. in Dance with a minor in Theater from Connecticut College and a M.F.A. from Arizona State University. She has studied at London Contemporary Dance School, taught and performed internationally, and was the Associate Artistic Director of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Metro D.C. for over a decade. For five years she was at Arizona State University as the Coordinator of Socially Engaged Practice, working with an interdisciplinary team to create new curricula focused on training artists to work in, and engage with, diverse communities. She then spent two years immersed in arts integration while living in Chicago, working with Hubbard Street Dance’s Community Programs and with the Arts Integration Mentorship project at Columbia College Chicago. Elizabeth recently worked with Liz Lerman at Arizona State University as the Co-Director (with Nik Zaleski) of CounterAct a multiyear campus wide Arts Based Initiative for Sexual Violence prevention.
EJ has been connected to Dance Exchange (full or part time) since 1998 and is currently Associate Artistic Director and Director of Partnerships.
Assane Konte
Assane Konte, a national of Senegal, West Africa, is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director, Choreographer, and Costume Designer for KanKouran West African Dance Company. He began his dance training at age 12, and studied with many prominent traditional dancers and musicians throughout West Africa. These teachers/mentors from Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, and Senegal, were instrumental in his development as a multi-talented artist. His career as a professional dancer began at age 15 with the “Ballet Africaine de Diebel Guee” of Dakar, Senegal. During his ten years with the company, he electrified audiences with his performances, while simultaneously developing his own movement style. In 1978, following a tour in Cote d’Ivoire, where he worked and performed as a guest consultant for a locally based dance company, Mr. Konte came to the United States to pursue a career as an independent performer and worked with numerous dance companies as a musical arranger and choreographer.
To accomplish his ultimate goal of introducing traditional African dance and drumming to wider audiences in the U.S., Mr. Konte founded the KanKouran West African Dance Company in 1983, along with his childhood friend, Abdou Kounta, a master drummer also from Senegal. Mr. Konte assumed the responsibilities of Artistic Director of the company. Since that time, his lifelong dedication to preserving and sharing Africa’s rich culture through dance and music has made him a goodwill ambassador, promoting cross-cultural appreciation and understanding. For his tireless work, innovative choreography, and outstanding contribution to the community, Mr. Konte has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, including most recently being named a Dance/USA Fellow in 2020.
His choreography and costume designs have enhanced not only KanKouran’s stage professionalism, but countless other local and national dance companies as well. Mr. Konte has elevated U.S.-based African dance to the highest professional level. He has challenged his company’s dancers and drummers to achieve impressive levels of virtuosity and technical ability. Mr. Konte’s ingenious creativity and spirit is always in demand at home and abroad, and he conducts annual programs in Poland, Hawaii, Japan, and St. Croix. Mr. Konte has held faculty positions in the dance departments of American University and George Mason University, and presently serves on the faculty at Howard University. Mr. Konte, along with his dance company, was invited by President and First Lady Bush to perform at the White House for African dignitaries at the “Malaria Awareness Day Celebration”, and again for First Lady Michelle Obama’s annual Black History Month program. He and his company also had the honor and pleasure of representing the best male and female African athletes with a performance at the Association of National Olympic Committees award ceremony.
Sarah Ramey
Sarah Ramey is a choreographer, performer and teacher focused on building community through dancing and dance-making. Originally from just outside Baltimore, Maryland, Sarah moved to Columbus, OH in 2013 to pursue her MFA in Dance at The Ohio State University. Her approach to teaching and art-making is heavily influenced by her time as a dancer and choreographer with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, a Washington, DC based intergenerational dance company whose members ranged in age from mid-20s to mid-70s. With Dance Exchange, she originated roles in new work and toured extensively with the company to perform, teach, and create dances with people of all ages and backgrounds. Highlights include teaching and choreographic residencies at the Kohler Arts Center (WI), Harvard University, and St Elizabeth’s Hospital (DC). In addition to dancing in the work of Liz Lerman, Cassie Meador, and Keith Thompson at Dance Exchange, she’s had the pleasure of working with choreographers including Ann Sofie Clemmensen, Robert Battle, Ani Javian, Gesel Mason, Bebe Miller, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater, and Samantha Speis.
Sarah’s choreographic work explores the joys and aches of life on this earth and the longings that make us look inward and outward and upward for meaning. Her dances have been presented at venues including Dance Place (DC), The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bealtaine Festival (Ireland), Ten Tiny Dances (OH), Columbus Dance Theatre, OhioDance Festival, Urban Arts Space, and Ohio Wesleyan University. Sarah was awarded the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Choreography (2009) and Solo Performance (2010), a 2011 Local Dance Commission Project award from the Kennedy Center, a 2012 Metro DC Dance Award for Emerging Choreographer, and a 2015 Columbus Dances Fellowship. In 2015, with funding from an Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, she created a dance program for adults over 50 which she continues to direct.
Sarah received her BA in Dance from the University of Maryland, College Park, and her MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University. She lives in Clintonville with her husband, Steve, and their two-year-old daughter. She and Steve play music together in the band Ramey.
Angelina Ramirez
Angelina Ramirez began studying Flamenco at the age of nine with Olivia Rojo in Tucson, Arizona. She continued her studies at the National Institute of Flamenco Arts in Albuquerque, New Mexico studying with Eva Encinias, Joaquin Encinias, Omayra Amaya and Marisol Encinias. Angelina became an original member of Yjastros, the American Flamenco Repertory Company. Upon returning to Arizona, Angelina founded Flamenco Por La Vida.
Along with performing and teaching, Angelina produces two festivals in Arizona, Lluvia Flamenca and The Phoenix Festival de España. Angelina has toured with world-renowned, New York based company Noche Flamenca.
Angelina received the Arizona Commission on the Arts' Artist Research and Development Grant for her work and development of /SER/ in 2018. /SER/ is a flamenco project that explores what it means to be a queer, latinx flamenca, practicing in a traditional gitano (gypsy) form of dance.
Angelina was selected to participate in the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures 2017 Leadership Institute. In 2016, Angelina was also selected to participate in the inaugural Creative Aging Teaching Artist Institute through the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Angelina was nominated for an Arizona Governor’s Arts Award in 2016 and her company Flamenco Por La Vida was awarded the 2014 Phoenix Mayors Arts Award for Best Dance Organization.