Molissa fenley biography

Christiana Axelsen

Christiana Axelsen is originally from Bainbridge Island, Washington and has been dancing with Molissa Fenley since 2013. She assists Molissa in reconstructing major repertory works and has served as a rehearsal director setting Molissa's work on Oakland Ballet, (Redwood Park), Repertory Dance Theater in Salt Lake City, (Energizer), and Barnard/Columbia, (Amdo). In addition to her work with Molissa Fenley and Company, she has danced with Christopher Williams, Beth Gill, Michou Szabo, zoe|juniper, Korhan Basaran, Courtney Krantz, Dai Jian, Raja Kelly, Jules Skloot and Mana Kawamura among others. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in dance and geology from Mount Holyoke College and is a graduate of the Merce Cunningham Professional Training Program. Photo by Quinlan Corbett, 2024

Rebecca Chaleff

Rebecca Chaleff is a dance scholar, performer, and dramaturg. Her academic research focuses on how the politics of race and sexuality shape and are shaped by contemporary reperformance and legacy building projects. As a dancer, Rebecca has performed with GERALDCASELDANCE, Pat Catterson, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Repertory Understudy Group, Douglas Dunn and Dancers, and the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, among others. She was also the dramaturg for Gerald Casel's Not About Race Dance (2021). Rebecca performed with Molissa Fenley and Company from 2012-2017, during which time she reconstructed and originated roles in numerous works spanning the breadth of Fenley's oeuvre. She served as the Rehearsal Director for the 2020 and 2021 restagings of State of Darkness at The Joyce Theater. Rebecca is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at SUNY, the University at Buffalo.

Betsy Cooper

Betsy Cooper trained at the School of American Ballet and has performed with classical and contemporary companies nationally and abroad, including Nationaltheater Mannheim, Matthew Nash

  • Molissa Fenley is an American
  • Molissa Fenley (born 1954)is an American
    • Molissa Fenley (Choreographer and Performer) was born in Las Vegas in 1954. She grew up in Nigeria, lived in Spain, and returned to the US where she received a degree in dance from Mills College in 1975. She moved to New York City that year and formed Molissa Fenley and Dancers in 1977. Her 30-year career of choreographing and presenting her work has developed in cycles. During her first ten years (1977-1987) she focused on presenting group works, performed by herself and an ensemble of dancers. In the second ten years (1987-1997) her work shifted to solo performances created in collaboration with contemporary visual artists and composers. Now, in a third cycle, she is once again exploring the dynamics of ensemble work.
    Fenley's choreographic works for her company include ENERGIZER (1980), commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop; GENTLE DESIRE (1981), commissioned by the American Dance Festival, HEMISPHERES (1983) and GEOLOGIC MOMENTS (1986) both commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival; CENOTAPH (1985), commissioned by Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and received a Bessie Choreography award, ESPERANTO (1985) and SEPARATE VOICES (1987) which both premiered at The Joyce Theater.  Recent works include ON THE OTHER OCEAN ((1997), DELTA (2000), SKY GARDEN (2002), 331 STEPS (2002), commissioned by The Joyce Theater, WATER COURSES (2003), KURO SHIO (2003), LAVA FIELD (2004), DESERT SEA (2005) and PATTERNS AND EXPECTATIONS (2005).

    Solo works include STATE OF DARKNESS (1988), commissioned by The American Dance Festival and received a Bessie Choreography award, (Peter Boal, principal dancer with The New York City Ballet was awarded a 2000 Bessie Performance award for his revival performance of STATE OF DARKNESS); PROVENANCE UNKNOWN (1989), a co-commission by The Kitchen and Dance Chance; THE FLOOR DANCES (1989), commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation, BARDO (1990) and POLA'A

  • Molissa Fenley (Choreographer and Performer) was

    • Molissa Fenley

    Molissa Fenley (born 1954)is an American choreographer, performer and teacher of contemporary dance.

    Early life and education

    Molissa Fenley (née Avril Molissa Fenley) was born in Las Vegas, Nevada on November 15, 1954. She is the youngest of three children born to Eileen Allison Walker and John Morris Fenley. At the age of six months Fenley and her family moved to Ithaca, NY where her father was a professor of the Agricultural Extension at Cornell University. At the age of six, her family moved to Ibadan, Nigeria where her father worked for the US State Department's USAID program. Fenley attended high school in Spain, and in 1971, at 16, returned to the US to enter Mills College from which she received her BA in Dance in 1975.[1] Immediately after graduating from Mills, Fenley moved to New York City to begin her career as a choreographer and dancer.[2],

    Career

    Early years

    Upon arriving in New York City in 1975, Fenley trained with Merce Cunningham, Viola Farber and studied at the Erick Hawkins School. During her first years in New York Fenley danced for several choreographers including Carol Conway and Andrew deGroat. She began creating her own work and formed Molissa Fenley and Company in 1977. After a tour of European festivals in 1980 her work began to receive more critical attention in the United States and abroad. Her early career (1977–1987) was focused on presenting ensemble work. In addition to more traditional dance classes, Fenley and her dancers did workouts that included running, calisthenics and weight training. Fenley has maintained this aesthetic of athletic virtuosity throughout her career.

    Solo work

    In 1987 she disbanded her ensemble and made a shift to performing solo works, often in collaboration with visual artists including Roy Fowler, Keith Haring, Jene Hightstein, Richard Long, Kiki Smith, Keith Sonnier, Merrill Wa

      Molissa fenley biography


    Molissa Fenley

    Molissa Fenley has found a highly personal and effective means of making silent dances speak of social and moral distress. No narrative, no costume, no painted backdrop could better have demonstrated the possibility of spiritual healing through physical control than Fenley’s distinctive body language, poignantly accented by David Moodie’s lighting design.

    The challenge Fenley set herself was to trigger emotional responses and suggest narrative directions, using an essentially abstract form, and in her recent homage to the wildlife lost by the Alaskan oil spill of March 1989, she did just that. The Floor Dances (Requiem for the Living), 1989, set in a circular stone sculpture by Richard Long, was a meditation on the beginning and end of the world. Fenley’s movement, accompanied by Polish composer Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki’s beautiful Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, transformed Long’s sculpture into a prehistoric magic circle bathed in icy northern light, within which Fenley’s body, weighted to the floor as though by a membrane of crude oil, struggled to snatch life back from death. Sometimes using the stones as pillows, at other times to suggest the edges of a pool in which to cleanse a crippled body, Fenley shifted weight from hip to knee, propelling herself into a praying position, only to topple over on her side like a seal out of water. Her arms articulated curved shapes above her head and across her chest or wrapped around her waist; at times they suggested wings attempting flight, at others a tragic signal for help. Her below-eye-level choreography—kneeling, sitting, or reclining—within the strict confines of the circle, became a complex essay on the relationship between ground and gravity that every dancer must address.

    Fenley’s State of Darkness, 1988, a central work in her oeuvre, was performed between two newer works. Demonstrating Fenley’s mastery over the solo form by showin

  • Molissa Fenley (Choreographer and Performer) was