Intermediate/Advanced Dancers, Ages 11-Adult
Thursday, November 9, 2017

4:30-6:00pm
Kanopy Dance Studio, 341 State Street
$25

Anna Sokolow’s unique approach to dance  demands a careful balance of movement, musicality, and drama, provides the framework for her determined quest for truth in artistry.  This technique class will give students an introduction to the principles and methodology required to perform Anna Sokolow’s works. 

Anna Sokolow (1910-2000). Known as one of the most dynamic and uncompromising of choreographers, Ms. Sokolow began her career as a dancer with Martha Graham. In the early thirties, she studied choreography with Louis Horst at the Neighborhood Playhouse and quickly became his assistant and most outstanding composition student. The work of Ms. Sokolow has had and continues to have a profound effect on the course of contemporary dance throughout the world. She founded the first modern dance companies in Israel and Mexico and influenced such artists as Alvin Ailey, Pina Bausch, and Martha Clark. Ms. Sokolow also made important contributions to the theater. Her choreography for the Broadway stage included Street Scene (1947), Regina (1949), and Candide (with Leonard Bernstein, 1956); in 1967 she created the original dances for the off-Broadway production of Hair. She was a founding member of The Actors Studio, where she taught movement for actors. As a teacher of dance, Ms. Sokolow covered much ground, from the Juilliard School (prominently featured in a 2002 documentary) and the 92nd Street Y in New York City to the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. Anna Sokolow created a body of work that combines dance and music with theater, poetry and prose. Called the “Solzhenitsyn of twentieth-century dance,” she consistently and uncompromisingly reflected the realities of society through her work. 

Samantha Geracht, (Artistic Director of Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble) was a member of Anna Sokolow’s Players’ Project for eleven years, and when the name changed, became a founding member of Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble (2004). As a Sokolow authority, Ms. Geracht reconstructs Sokolow works on students and professional companies as well as teaching Sokolow technique classes. Recently she reconstructed Ms. Sokolow’s Ride the Culture Loop on the Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble, a suite from “Rooms” at Franklin and Marshall College and The Unanswered Question on the students studying in the Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble classes.

Ms. Geracht danced extensively with Deborah Carr Theatre Dance Ensemble performing the works of Charles Weidman, Doris Humphrey and Ms. Carr. She has performed with Jim May, Gail Corbin, Richard Biles, Claudia Gitelman, David Parker and The Bang Group, Rae Ballard’s Thoughts In Motion; and performs and presents her own choreography. Ms. Geracht holds a BS in dance from the University of Wisconsin. After graduating from UW she studied extensively at the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab in New York City. Over the course of her 25-year career she continuously trains under Betty Jones, Fritz Luden and her mentor Jim May.

Do you need a place to stay? University Campus housing is available and within walking distance to Kanopy Studio. Go to: www.visitmadison.com or http://campusareahousing.wisc.edu/ Questions: [email protected] or 608.255.2211

closed Nov 10, 2017