Bios & Background Company Mission: Artistic Statement:
Nichole Canuso combines subtle gesture and explosive movement to explore the human condition through dance. Her work has been inspired by literary sources ranging from Samuel Beckett’s ‘Act without Words I’ to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’. Each dance invites the audience to journey alongside Canuso (metaphorically in stage performance and literally in site-based works) as she and the performers embody the fabulous mystery of human warmth and its intersection with the cold logic of existence. Nichole’s dancing, choreography and study have taken her throughout France, Scotland, Poland, Japan and across the U.S. Her work has been supported by a Bessie Shoenberg First Light Commission, The Leeway Foundation, the Independence Foundation, Dance Advance (a grant program funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by the University of the Arts), The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Ellen Foreman Memorial Award. Choreographic residencies include The New Edge Residency (CEC, Philadelphia), nEW festival (MSDT, Philadelphia), The Swarthmore Project (Swarthmore College, PA), The Choreographer’s Project (Susan Hess Dance Studio, Philadelphia). Nichole’s choreographic projects have been presented by Dance Theater Workshop (NYC), The Wilma Dance Boom Fesival (Phila), Judson Church Movement Research Exchange(NYC, Phila), DancePlace(D.C.), Links Hall (Chicago), Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival(NYC), The Philadelpia Fringe Festival and The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Swarthmore College (PA), Hampshire College (MA). She has been a guest choreographer at Drexel University, BrynMawr College, and is currently on the dance faculty at Lawrenceville High School. hool. In addition to her own choreographic projects, Canuso collaborates with several dance and theater companies. Most notably as a company member with Bessie Award-winning Headlong Dance Theater, where she has been a company member for 10 years. Work with Pig Iron Theater Company includes the creation and performance of a 3 woman clown play ‘FLOP’. Other companies include Karen Bamonte Dance Works, Group Motion Dance Company, Big Mess Theater, The Arden Theater, Theater Exile, and Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival. Nichole was a co founder and co director of Moxie dance collective from 1999-2004
Check out some of the artists that Nichole and NCDC have had the pleasure of working with here in Philadelphia.
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The Creative Team for Wandering Alice: Nichole Canuso James Sugg Lars Jan (not pictured) Dancer bios coming soon! Suli Holum (dramaturg/writer) co-founded the Pig Iron Theatre Company where she was a co-Artistic Director and Head of Education and Outreach from 1996-2001, then company member from 2001-2006. Her work with Pig Iron encompassed many roles onstage and off. She co-wrote and performed The Odyssey, Dig or Fly, and The Snow Queen (produced by the Arden Theatre in Philadelphia). She received a Barrymore Award for Choreography for Cafeteria, and was nominated for her choreography in The Tragedy of Joan of Arc. She wrote Gentlemen Volunteers, nominated for a Barrymore for Best New Play and subsequently toured around the world. She co-created and performed Anodyne, a site-specific journey inspired by Jerzy Kozinski's The Painted Bird. She also co-created and performed in Shut Eye with legendary theatre director Joseph Chaikin. As a recipient of the Shell Fellowship in Drama from the National Institute of Education in Singapore Ms. Holum traveled to Singapore to perform her solo work, The Lollipop Project, and to lead workshops on the development and performance of new work to students at the NIE. She subsequently received an Individual Artist Grant from the Independence Foundation to produce the work at the Walnut Street Theatre, Studio Three and was presented by Pendragon Theatre, Goddard College, and at the Flea Theater in New York City. After relocating from Philadelphia to New York in 2001, she began developing new works of physical theater with The Talking Band and The Theater of the Two-Headed Calf, both in residence at La Mama, ETC, and participating in new play development through workshops and readings at New Dramatists, Naked Angels, and Ars Nova. She performs in New York and regionally, including the New York premiere of Paula Vogel's Hot 'n' Throbbing at the Signature Theatre and Born Yesterday at Arena Stage which earned her a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress. She received a Drama Desk Award as part of the ensemble of Israel Horowitz’s Lebensraum. She was the director and dramaturge of Leigh Garret's solo work Lunacy Cycles presented by Dance New Amsterdam. She also designed workshops for performers of Hipgnosis Theatre in preparation for their staging of Measure for Measure as well as for the Elastic Theatre's original piece Bitch on Wheels. She is co-writing and directing The Elastic Theatre’s The Word to be presented by the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival in 2007. Holum graduated from the Baltimore School for the Arts and Swarthmore College with a BA in Theatre Studies, Phi Beta Kappa. Her eclectic training includes neutral mask, commedia mask, clown, mime, dance, Viewpoints with Mary Overlie, classical text analysis and performance, and voice and speech. She has taught at The University of the Arts, as a resident teaching artist at People's Light and Theatre, with Philadelphia Young Playwrights Festival, at Goddard College, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Lincoln Center and the Public Theatre in New York City.
Jen Goettner In 2001, Jen returned to UArts to pursue her graduate degree in industrial design. Her thesis, titled Site Ensemble: The Perfomative Product in the Urban Milieu produced a collection of interactive umbrellas: Sticky, Spinny and Spot. She received her MID in May 2003. Her re-focused approach to design was expressed in her role as prop-maker for Headlong Dance Theater, where she designed and built the wig for Britney's Inferno, Philadelphia Live Arts Festival 2002, DTW, NYC 2003. It was while working with Headlong that Jen met Nichole Canuso, and later designed the costumes for Moxie Dance Collective's Better I'd Stayed Up in 2003, for NCDC's We Spar Down The Lane in 2005, and NCDC's Fail Better and Other Works in 2006. In 2003, Jen joined Basekamp, a socially-experimental art, design and curatorial residency program dedicated to collaborative cultural production. Through the course of her three-year term, she co-produced large-scale, interactive installations presented within the field of contemporary art. These works include Evident Use, (in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Architecture) in 'DeTourism Bureau' I & II. Contemporary Artists Center, North Adams. 2004 - 2006, 'This Way Please' Pond, San Francisco. 2005, and 'Spacemakers' Lothringer 13, Munich. 2004. Mobile Sandbox Unit in 'Version>05' festival and conference. Chicago. 2005 and Discussion Panels. In 'Making Room for Redundancy'. Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. 2005. In the summer of 2005, Jen mounted
her site-specific performance installation titled Lunch-Hour
Lifeguard: On Duty at Basekamp. In 2006, she was a finalist
for the PEW Fellowship in Sculpture and Installation. Also
in 2006, she and Scott Rigby co-authored a proposal for an
experimental conference which received a PEI Research grant
to support Plausible Artworlds>Strategic
Planning Event at the Basekamp gallery, summer 2006.
Lars Jan In 2005, Lars taught courses on emerging media in performance at Mount Holyoke College and Princeton University, where he developed a new work as a fellow of the Atelier Program. During the summer of 2005, he received a grant from the U.S. State Department to work as an artist-in-residence at Kabul University and to develop a number of public art projects in Afghanistan (see mobileperformance.og). This past fall, he inaugurated the Whitney Live series at the Whitney Museum of American Art with an original commissioned work set in the context of the Robert Smithson retrospective. Most recently, he premiered a short film about Los Angeles at the 2006 Venice Architectural Biennale. He is currently pursuing an MFA in directing and integrated media at the California Institute of the Arts as a Jack Kent Cooke Fellow. James Sugg After having success with his first two sound design projects, Gentlemen Volunteers(Barrymore award "Outstanding Sound Design" 1999), The Lorca Cycle(Philadelphia Weekly's Best Sound Design, 1999), he began working as sound designer for The Wilma, The Arden Theatre, Seattle Rep, Actors Theater of Louisville, Freedom Theatre, UArts, Princeton University and Lantern Theatre. James has received the Barrymore for "Outstanding Sound Design" four times and has been nominated for design and composition ten additional times. Most recently, he composed the rock and roll score to Pig Iron's James Joyce Is Dead and So Is Paris and the bluegrass/country music to a new Mark Twain musical, A Murder, A Mystery and a Marriage(10 Barrymore nominations) which had it's world premiere at Delaware Theatre Co. in the 05-06 season. James also premiered his rock and roll song cycle,The Sea, this year as part of the LiveArts festival. Finally, the ultimate rush has been fronting the band The Brothers Suggarillo, and regularly whipping three hundred sweaty people to a bouncing froth. Michael Kiley Sound Design Credits include: Killer Joe (Theater Exile), Red Light Winter (Theater Exile) for which he composed original music. As an actor Kiley has worked with The Arden Theatre Company, The Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia Shakespeare Company, and Pig Iron Theatre Company, among others. He was also a Dorothy Haas Acting Fellow at the Walnut Street Theatre. Kiley received his undergraduate degree from New Mexico State University where he studied Theater and Music. Paul Peyton Moffitt (Lighting Design) is thrilled to be working with NCD. Paul got his BFA from the Universtiy of North Carolina at Greensboro. Paul has been Light Designing, Set Designing, and Production Managing through out the North East and Europe
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Nichole
Canuso (Artistic Director)'s Background: 
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