The Company
The DancersLiss FainCollaborating Artists
Board of DirectorsStaff
Liss Fain Dance tours nationally and internationally with work for proscenium stages and performance installations. The company has performed and taught at festivals and venues in Poland, Germany, Belarus, Russia and the UK as well as colleges, universities, festivals and presenting organizations in the US. Their home seasons in San Francisco are presented at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Z Space.
Liss Fain’s work ranges from pure dance pieces to collaborations with composers, lighting and set designers, videographers, actors and technologists. The company presents performance installations that bring the audience inside the set and close to the performers, proscenium performances, artistic exchanges with companies from abroad and free public outreach performance events.
Liss Fain’s work expresses the unpredictable course of events that comprise one’s life and peoples’ responses to unforeseen situations. Non-narrative, highly physical and emotionally resonant, her work fuses modern dance’s forceful energy with the kinetic precision of ballet. Since it’s founding in Boston in 1988, Liss Fain Dance has premiered over 45 works by Ms. Fain and collaborated with individuals and creative organizations that include MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, The Exploratorium and The Apple Multimedia Lab.
Liss Fain Dance has initiated IDE-A (International Dance Exchange-Artists), a bilateral artistic exchange between LFD and companies from abroad—and Performance Installations, for non-proscenium venues, galleries and libraries. Performance Installations invite the audience to move into the performance space, close to the dancers, and become an integral part of the performance.
The company’s international tours are sponsored by groups that include the U.S. Embassies in the host country, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, USAI, Dance USA and the host festivals. In 2010, LFD was one of four US companies invited to perform at Internationale Tanzmesse NRW, where they also were sponsored by Amerika Haus in a performance installation at the prestigious Beck & Eggeling Gallery, Dusseldorf.
Liss Fain Dance has performed at and been presented by, among others: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Z Space, the A.W.A.R.D. Show, West Wave, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, ODC Theater, Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts (CA), Internationale Tanzmesse NRW, Amerika Haus (Germany), Open Look Contemporary Dance Festival (St. Petersburg, Russia), Silesian Dance Festival (Bytom), Zawirowania Festival (Warsaw), the US Embassy (Warsaw), Contemporary Dance Forum (Poland), Belaya Vezha International Theater Festival, Minsk Philharmonic Society and Grodno Drama Theater (Belarus), California State Summer School of the Arts, International Computer Music Conference, the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, Downtown Dance Festival, NYC, Dance Umbrella, Boston, Harvard University, University of Massachusetts, Colby College, Clark University, and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Liss Fain Dance has received funding from Dance USA, USAI, Trust for Mutual Understanding, US Embassy in Poland, US Embassy in Belarus, Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship, San Francisco Arts Commission, the NEA, Zellerbach Family Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Walter A. Gerbode Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, East Bay Community Foundation, C.A.S.H., Fort Mason Foundation, Marin Arts Council, Tides Foundation, Massachusetts Council on the Arts & Humanities.