Liss Fain Dance’s evening-length performance installation works express our personal responses to the events that shape our lives. Through hybrid collaborative works of dance, installation/set, text, projection, and sound, LFD explores questions and perspectives we bring to our shared experiences. With dance as the focal point, the physically and visually expressive work creates a world the audience inhabits with the performers. Walking, standing, shifting focus—close to the performers—they bring the final layer of intimacy and unpredictability.
The company teaches outreach workshops to young people, Dancing to the Rhythm of Words, on the creation and integration of movement and text.
The unforeseen events that shape our lives, how we adapt or are upended, underlie LFD’s work. The individuality of the dancers accentuates our different experiences and responses in interdisciplinary, collaborative installation works.
Liss Fain Dance has performed and taught nationally and internationally at festivals across Europe and at universities, festivals and presenting organizations in the US. The company’s SF home seasons are presented at YBCA, ODC Theater and Z Space.
LFD ‘s cross-disciplinary work began in Boston in the 1980s with video and sound artists at MIT’s Media Lab and Mobius Theater. Relocating to the Bay Area in 1990, Fain worked with video /film artists at Apple Multimedia Lab, Rapt Productions, Kikim Media, and others, and began her long-time collaboration with installation/lighting/projection designer Matthew Antaky.
LFD shifted into installation and away from proscenium work in 2010 with a commission from Amerika Haus (Dusseldorf) for Beck and Eggling Gallery. The gallery’s three spaces were in separate buildings; the dancers moved among the galleries; with no repetitions in the choreography, each gallery contained a complete performance. The audience, choosing where to go, determined their individualized performance and experience.
LFD has since premiered fourteen installation works, each with a unique environment encompassing the space, performers, and audience. The artistic collaborators with Fain are the dancers, actors, installation/lighting/projection designer, and composer. There is no single front for the performers and audience who, by choosing and changing perspectives, are active viewers. The work has incorporated text from literature; stories drawn from intensive workshops with seniors in their 90’s and students at 826 Valencia, letters, personal reflections, notes contributed by the community at large, and work commissioned by two local choreographers.
The installations have been a gallery exhibit during the day, with additions to the physical set, and a performance space at night. These works have been co-presented by YBCA, ODC Theater, Z Space, Powerhouse (Brooklyn, co-publicized by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 3 LD Art & Technology (NYC), Mill Valley Library, and the David Brower Center (Berkeley).
Since 2011, LFD has taught workshops at 826 Valencia to young people from a broad spectrum of communities. The students expand their creativity and abilities to communicate abstract and concrete ideas through creating movement and writing.
For pre-professional and professional dancers, LFD teaches workshops on developing movement for installations.
LFD has toured Germany, Russia, Poland, Scotland, Belarus, New York, LA, Boston, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, among others. Fain was artist-in-residence at Berkeley Ballet Theater and is a two-time Izzy nominee.
HISTORY
LFD has performed at and been presented by, among others: YBCA; Z Space; ODC Theater; Powerhouse (Brooklyn); 3 Legged Dog (NYC); Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival; Internationale Tanzmesse NRW; Amerika Haus (Germany); Open Look Festival (Russia); Silesian Dance Festival; Zawirowania Festival, the US Embassy, Contemporary Dance Forum (Poland); Belaya Vezha International Theater Festival, Minsk Philharmonic Society, Grodno Drama Theater (Belarus); California State Summer School of the Arts; Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts; International Computer Music Conference; David Brower Center; A.W.A.R.D. Show; Mill Valley Library; West Wave; Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts; Downtown Dance Festival, NYC; MIT’s Media Lab; Harvard; University; Dance Umbrella Boston; University of Massachusetts; Colby College; Clark University.
The creation of LFD’s installations work has been sponsored by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC Theater, and Z Space in San Francisco and Amerika Haus at Beck & Eggeling Gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany.
Photo credits: RJ Muna (top), Frédéric O. Boulay