the Faculty
(participants will work with all faculty members in both the morning and afternoon)
KT Niehoff, Artistic Director of Lingo
KT Niehoff was Seattle Magazine’s 2007 dance artist of the Year. She was also featured in Dance Magazine’s April, ’08 issue, “International Women in Dance”. She is a 2001 Seattle Artist Trust Fellow and a 2006 Fellow of the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC). From 1996-2006 she was the founder and director of Velocity Dance Center in Seattle and has sat on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and USArtists International. In 2002, she was an invited artist delegate to the think-tank retreat at White Oak that was sponsored by the Doris Duke Foundation. Her work there helped lay the platform for the Pacific Northwest Regional Dance Lab sponsored by the New England Foundation for the Arts.
In 1998, KT created Lingo, a roving band of artists, brave hearts and lunatics, which has since been the major platform for her work, touring nationally and internationally.
As a teacher, Niehoff has taught contemporary technique and composition world wide at institutions including The SNDO (Amsterdam), Estudio 3 (Madrid), The Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts, and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Most recently, KT was a guest artist at Oberlin College and Cornish College of the Arts. She has just finished shooting her first film short titled Parts Don't Work.
Bianca Cabrera
Bianca Cabrera has been a company member of Lingo since 2003, collaborating on and touring with Lingo’s three major works, Speak to Me, Relatively Real and Inhabit, a social art feast. She has been a guest teacher at the University of Montana, San Diego State, St. Olaf College, Reed College, Kenyon College, Oberlin College, Cornish College, and Velocity Dance Center. Her choreography has been presented by Oberlin College, Annex Theatre and Cornish College, among other venues. She is committed to a practice of ensemble generation, Contact Improvisation, and is compelled by the body in question. Bianca began her training in Ballet and Graham Technique in 1995 at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. She continued training at the Alvin Ailey School and the Martha Graham Center before finishing a B.F.A. in dance at Cornish College of the Arts.
Aaron Swartzman
Aaron has danced professionally since 2001, working deeply with Lingo, UMAMI Performance and LeGendre Performance. Aaron’s passion is improvisation, which he sometimes thinks of as discovering spontaneous beauty and weaving it towards ongoing artistic transformation, or plunging headlong into the dusky risk factory, or listening. Aaron has been strongly influenced by KT Niehoff, Amii LeGendre, Lisa Nelson, Karen Nelson, Jennifer Monson, and Alia Swersky. The cornerstones of his movement practice are contact improvisation, contemplative dance practice, Capoeira Angola, and imaginary shamanism. Aaron has taught at the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation, Sierra Contact Festival, Strictly Seattle and Dance Art Group Movement Arts Research, as well as at numerous colleges while on tour with Lingo. He balances his love of hyper-physicality, his belief in dance as a tool for body based sustainability and his love of metacognition, thinking about how we learn and think, to create classes where rigorous play is contextualized as discovery and risks are validated.