Ping Chong & Muna Tseng

Photo: Lia Chang

PING CHONG is a theatre director, choreographer, video and installation artist.  He is the recipient of two Obie Awards including one for Sustained Achievement in 2000, six National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Playwrights USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a TCG/Pew Charitable Trust National Theatre Artist Residency Program Fellowship, a National Institute for Music Theatre Award, two “Bessie” Awards for Sustained Creative Achievement and for Outstanding Creative Achievement.  In 1994, Mr. Chong held the Wynton Chair at the University of Minnesota, was a Bellagio Fellow in 1998, and received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Cornish College in 1999 and an honorary Doctorate of Human Letters from Kent State University in 2004.  In December 2006, Ping Chong was honored the USA Prudential Fellowship by the United States Artists Foundation. Since 1972 he has created over 50 works for the stage, which have been presented at major venues all over the world.

MUNA TSENG  is a choreographer-dancer acclaimed for her seamless, liquid, poetic fusion of Asian minimalism with Western rigor and concepts in dance and visual performance.  In 1988, she founded Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc. in New York, and continues to produce and present new and repertory works. Acclaimed productions include "SlutForArt", a.k.a. "Ambiguous Ambassador" and "98.6: A Convergence in 15 Minutes", which won the 1999 New York Dance and Performance Award (a "Bessie") for Muna Tseng and her collaborator Ping Chong. Muna Tseng has received several repeat choreographic fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts.  Honors: "Chinese-American Cultural Pioneer for Distinguished Services in the Arts" (New York City Council President), "Artist of National Merit" (The Smithsonian Institution).

Heather Christian

HEATHER CHRISTIAN is the daughter of a go-go dancer and a blues Musician. She originally came to New York to pursue musical theater, studying at NYU’s CAP21, but later moved on to make her own work. She earned her BFA at Tisch, but also studied at the Samuel Beckett Reparatory at Trinity College in Ireland. She is primarily a singer/songwriter whose “plunk-prissy” piano stylings are product of 19 years of classical training, and maintains that her primary roots lie somewhere between Jimmy Reed and Frederic Chopin. For the stage, she has scored and acted as one-woman band for Real Theaterworks production Romeo and Juliet,  composed and danced a Sonata for Learning in Lower Animals at Dance Theater Workshop, and was last seen in Big Dance Theater’s production of The Other Here at the Japan society, singing all Okonowan disco music. She is an active member of Witness Relocation Company as well, and was seen last year here at LaMama in Dancing Vs. The Rat Experiment. Heather has been called a “pint sized dynamo,” “one belter of a blues singer” and the "female Bruce Springsteen" Though she doesn’t know what that means.  www.heatherchristian.com

Akim Funk Buddha

From the streets of Bali to Carnegie Hall, from meditative throat singing to high-energy Hip Hop rhymes, Akim Funk Buddha creates borderless performance art, fusing sounds and movements. An avid world traveler and self-described old-school B-boy MC, he is known for his holistic approach to Hip Hop, drawing from a full spectrum of cultural traditions and artistic disciplines. Rhyming, beat-boxing, mouth and body percussion, story-telling, break-dancing, Mongolian throat-singing, Indonesian monkey chants, body-balancing, martial arts, tap and circus arts are seamlessly blended to create distinctly spiritual yet urban sonic and visual compositions.

Dixie Shulman

Dixie FunLee Shulman relocated to NYC in late 1999 and soonafter created Dixie Fun Dance Theatre. Since 2002, Shulman performed her signature solo, "Twirl," in Dance Theater Workshop's Fresh Tracks series, PS122's Avant-Garde-Arama, the Dancenow/NYC Festival at Joe's Pub and the John Jay Auditorium, WAX, University Settlement, and the Estrogenius Festival at Manhattan Theater Source. Also in 2002 Shulman premiered her one-woman show, The Thinnest Woman Wins, at Dixon Place and Sal Anthony's Movement Salon, with later performances at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, First Glance Festival in Atlanta, and Canopy Studio in Athens, Georgia. In 1998, "Twirl" was toured with the King County Performance Network, a collaboration between the King County Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts and eleven local venues. Dixie graduated summa cum laude with an M.F.A. in Dance Performance and Choreography from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Since 2002 Shulman has been a guest artist with David Parker and the Bang Group.
www.dixiefundance.com

Kendall Cornel

Kendall Cornell has been creating and performing clown work in New York City and abroad since falling in love with it 13 years ago. Her dynamic solo clown pieces, such as Pink Salome, The Maneater, Glamourpuss, P.S. de la Resistance, and The Wallflower have been presented at La MaMa, The Brick’s New York Clown Theatre Festival, Chicago’s City of Fools Festival, Six Figures’ Artists of Tomorrow Festival, the 92nd Street Y’s Makor, and elsewhere in NYC and abroad.  She also created and starred in an innovative short clown film, A Clown Idyll, which will premiere in NYC this year. Kendall has a background in modern dance, and she danced alongside Jennifer Muller/The Works Company for over 15 years, also teaching Muller technique classes in NYC and Europe.  Kendall’s foremost acting training has been with Alan Langdon at Circle in the Square, and she has trod the boards in many downtown NYC theatres.  Her clown training has been with some of the best clowns and teachers in the western world such as David Shiner (whom she assisted in his master classes), Chris Bayes, Angela de Castro, Ami Hattab, and the renowned Philippe Gaulier (whom she also assisted, after bringing him to teach in the USA for the first time). 

Jen Abrams

Jen Abrams' choreographic work has been presented at BAX, HERE, Dixon Place, as well as at WOW Café Theater, where she has been an active member for seven years. She has produced three full-length concerts of her own work at WOW, as well as three shared bill evenings: with Risa Jaroslow and Eva Lawrence; with Clarinda Mac Low and Tara O¹Con; and with Kristin O'Neal. She was a 2005 BAX space grantee, and is co-curator and co-producer with Sally Silvers of TalkTalk WalkWalk, an annual poetry and dance festival. Her choreographic work has also been seen at WOW in several stage plays with Dogsbody Theater. The Village Voice has said she is "convincing no matter what [she chooses] to do," and Gay City News said, "she has clarity and verve." Jen has studied the form of Contact Improvisation for twelve years, beginning at Oberlin College, the birthplace of the form. She relocated to New York City from Chicago, where she presented and performed in five full-length concerts with the contact improv-based company she co-founded, Limbic Fix. She is classically trained as an actor, and performed in plays throughout Chicago before moving to New York City to focus on movement-based performance. She is also a writer, and has given readings of her work at St. Mark¹s Poetry Project, Halcyon, and Bar 13.
By day, Jen works as a fundraiser for a small poetry press, and serves as Managing Director for Risa Jaroslow & Dancers. She also teaches Contact Improv through Movement Research.