Dear Friend,

The company and I wish you a joyous holiday season of sharing with family and friends. Thanks to your support, Liss Fain Dance has had its most exciting year to date, including the premiere of When Still at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in June and three weeks of touring this August in Scotland, performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Large audiences and strong reviews of the concerts in San Francisco and Scotland in 2006 have laid the foundation for future international engagements and an exciting home season in June of 2007 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where we will premiere an innovative artistic collaboration with visual designer Matthew Antaky and a guest video artist. Set to the last two sections of Writing to Vermeer, Louis Andriessen's opera about the Dutch Year of Disaster, 1672, the piece will seamlessly connect dancers onstage with images projected on specially designed surfaces. The movement and visual elements of the piece arise from the apparent stability and calm of peoples' lives clashing with the undercurrent of turmoil growing from societal and political unrest, creating tensions between what one wishes to have occur and what is in fact occurring.

Throughout our performances in the UK last August, I experienced the excitement audiences felt at seeing my work and the work of other artists. Their enthusiasm reaffirmed my commitment to creating work that addresses the emotions and situations that underlie our lives. Performing and teaching in other countries is a valuable way of promoting communication and cultural exchange between nations.

The support of individuals interested in the creation and presentation of our work is critical for us in the challenging process of conceiving and producing new pieces. In this time of reduced foundation and government support of the arts, much of the available funds are channeled towards community service programs rather than artistic creation. Because of this, the private donations in 2006 were an essential component of bringing our work to audiences in Edinburgh, and remain an integral to part of our efforts towards enhancing international relations and cultural exchange through the arts. One result of the Edinburgh tour is the invitation for Liss Fain Dance to perform in Belarus and Kaliningrad, Russia in 2007; touring to other European and Asian cities is in the pipeline.

We hope that you will think of Liss Fain Dance when you make your year-end donations and help us continue our pursuit of creating provocative, innovative work, for presentation in both the U.S. and internationally. Because LFD is a 501c3 non-profit organization, your gift is completely tax-deductible.

Thank you for your continued support.

With Best Wishes for the Holidays,
 



Liss Fain
www.lissfaindance.org

Join the Friends of Liss Fain Dance

The Friends of Liss Fain Dance provide the financial support that helps underwrite dancers' salaries, designers' fees, rehearsal space rental and production expenses. Individual contributions are the backbone of our operation, providing 70% of operating expenses, with foundation grants and box office revenues covering 30%.

We invite you to join us for this exciting year of introducing Liss Fain Dance to new audiences around the world. Your underwriting contribution is fully tax-deductible because Liss Fain Dance is a non-profit corporation (501 (c) 3). Contributors will receive name recognition on all printed materials.

 

Liss Fain Dance Friends

Donate any amount via Paypal or at: Liss Fain Dance; 26 Seventh Street, 5th Floor; San Francisco, CA 94103

We would like to share with you some of the critical comments published following our home season and Edinburgh Festival Fringe performances.

"Fain designs her choreography with space in mind. Her nine dancers flow in and out of the wings with an ease that suggests that a dance is much larger than what we actually see in front of us. Once on stage, they fill it with long extensions and voluptuous lunges that thrust the energy beyond the body's physical confines… (It is) beautifully flowing work full of eloquent arms and billowing encounters that suggest both permanence and changeability…glistening with a cool and intelligent appeal…airy, with wonderful upward thrusts, and sculptural impulses… Her latest world premiere, 'When Still', …glows with burnished intensity".  —DanceViewTimes.com

"…there is a strong, unifying brand that flows through all of the pieces. Fain's movement is strongly influenced by the music, having an abstract, emotional and melancholic quality, unencumbered by narrative…The choice of music is clearly fundamental to the creative process: 'The Line Between Night and Day' is set to two movements of Olivier Messiaen's 'Quartet for the End of Time', written whilst a prisoner of war during WWII; and 'When Still' is created in three separate sections, corresponding to two madrigals from Monteverdi's 'Madrigals of Love And War' and ending with Chanticleer's 'Beata'. In fact, these separate works sit together so well that they should be seen as two parts of a whole. The gentle introspective choral music of 'When Still' and the flowing, spiritual movement that it inspires, offsets perfectly the anguished images of a disintegrating civilisation in turmoil that characterises 'The Line Between Night and Day'. It is a sour and sweet combination that should always be seen together… The complex movement dynamics evolve and change, alternating between joy and isolation…the mature professionalism, fluid movement and poetic musicality of an excellent little company which stands neatly at the apex of contemporary and classical dance."  —Ballet.co.uk Magazine

"I was fascinated by Fain's approach to the score (which was Ligeti's 'Piano Concerto'), the way she can at times follow the complex rhythmical patternings, the violent explosions of sound which boom out of the quiet pianissimi, the way the spinning patterns of the piano's cadenza-like passage are matched by a helter-skelter of bubbling movement and the way her dancers seem to treat dance as contemplation of musical score…we see a whole series of pas de deux that range from the intimate and sensual (the use of the collpase/catch motif) to the violent and brutal."  —Ballet.co.uk Magazine

"…if it's an hour of pure modern dance you're after, Liss Fain has much to offer…there is a real urgency to both the music and movement…the dancers fill the work with high leg extensions and energetic leaps. Her style has a real sense of flow which is beguiling to watch, and her dancers' technical ability and musical awareness makes this triple bill one of the better examples of pure dance at this year's Fringe."  —The Scotsman

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