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Sarah Baumert (dancer) is a dance artist based out of Minneapolis and Philadelphia.She has been working with Emily Johnson and the Catalyst dancers since 2003 and finds them to be a refreshing and dedicated group of women. After graduating from the University of Minnesota she began working with Zenon Dance Co. with whom she performed the works of many wonderful choreographers including Jeanine Durning, Keely Garfield, Cathy Young and Tere O'Conner. Along with Emily, she currently dances with Sean Feldman and Maggie Bergeron. In addition to dancing she takes pleasure in baking cakes, sewing her own clothes, riding her bicycle,bartering more and buying less.
Jessica Cressey (dancer) is a freelance dancer in Minneapolis. She has also danced with Hijack, Body Cartography, Morgan Thorson and many others.
| heidi eckwall • lighting designer |
Heidi Eckwall (lighting designer) is a lighting and set designer, experimental film/video maker, puppeteer and writer. She got her start designing lights at Theater Club Funambules/NADA on Ludlow Street in 1989 and moved back home to Minneapolis in 1990. She has worked at the Guthrie Theater, Walker Art Center,Ordway Center for Performing Arts, Patrick's Cabaret, Mixed Blood, Heart of the Beast, Red Eye and Southern Theater and Bedlam. She tours nationally and internationally with Hijack, Shawn McConneloug and her Orchestra, Mary Ellen Childs' CRASH, Joe Chvala and the Flying Foot Forum, Zorongo Flamenco, Rinde Eckert, Paul Dresher and Zeitgeist. She has worked with Emily Johnson since 2003.
| jg everest • music director/multi-instrumentalist/composer |
Multi-instrumentalist/composer JG Everest (music director) hails from Minneapolis where he has been a seminal figure in the vibrant music scene for over 20 years, with projects Lateduster, Sans Le Systeme, Roma Di Luna, Norway Twin, Vicious Vicious, Fresh Squeez, The Dijonettes, The Sensational Joint Chiefs, and as a solo artist. He has collaborated with many past and present Minneapolis musicians, including Walter Kitundu, Martin Dosh, Ben Weaver, and Slug (Atmosphere) From 2002-04, Everest also worked with electronic/multimedia pioneer Riz Maslen in her UK-based group, NEOTROPIC. Since 2002 Everest has been a close collaborator with choreographer Emily Johnson and Catalyst, —writing and performing original scores for several performances around the U.S. and Canada with both Lateduster and as a solo artist. In recent years, he has come to utilize effects and looping pedals in creating multilayered compositions in real-time performances that allow him to create vast, expansive soundscapes as an individual performer, using guitar, keyboards, voice, trumpet, percussion and samplers. Since 2005, he has hosted and curated the MAKING MUSIC conversations series at the University of Minnesota's Whole Music Club. For more information, go to: www.jgeverest.com.
Natasha Hassett (dancer), a Minneapolis native, graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1999 with a summa cum laude degree in Spanish and Portuguese and a minor in dance. She met Emily johnson at the U and in 1998 became a founding member of Catalyst, from which she has since not budged. She additionally spent4 consecutive years with Paula Mann Dance, worked briefly with choreographer Gretchen Pick and the theater director/comedian Noah Bremer, and in October 2001picked up a bass guitar to help form the Minneapolis rock band Revolver Modele. Currently, she is in her 5th year working at an environmental organization and she is maintaining Catalyst and the band as her primary artistic endeavors.
| emily johnson • choreographer/director |
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Emily Johnson is a director/choreographer/curator, originally from Alaska and currently based in Minneapolis. Her company, Catalyst, has performed since 1998. Johnson works to make deliberate meaning, random association, and powerful movement the essential aspects of dance pieces that are thought-provoking and entertaining. |
Marked by fiercely intuitive, minimalist, pedestrian-bent choreography, her dances include commissions by institutions, theaters and colleges throughout middle america, including the Walker Art Center, Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, Three Legged Race, the Red Eye Theater, Macalester College, St. Olaf College, and the Walker Art Center and Southern Theater as part of Momentum, New Dance Works. Johnson has been presented by Franconia Sculpture Park, the ODC Theater in San Francisco, Velocity in Seattle, and the Southern Theater in Minneapolis as part of Scuba, a national touring dance network and has self-presented in numerous venues including Dance Theater Workshop in New York, the Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis, and the Que'Ana Bar in Clam Gulch, Alaska. She has embarked on performance projects in Montreal, Quebec; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Amsterdam, Netherlands and has toured her company to Alaska, California, Washington, Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska and New York. She has led movement workshops in Chicago, Minneapolis, Montreal and through the VIZIT Agency in St. Petersburg. Her repertory work has been set on the dance program students at Carleton College, Macalester College and the University of Minnesota.
Johnson is the recipient of numerous awards including a Bush Artist Fellowship (2004), Jerome Artist Fellowship (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004), Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship (2001); her work is currently supported by the Puffin Foundation and the Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation.
Her longtime collaborative efforts include work with composer JG Everest, videographer and editor Randy Kramer, lighting designer Heidi Eckwall and costumer Angie Vo. She is part of Local Strategy, a multidisciplinary art collective that investigates and animates public spaces through collaborative artistic effort. Local Strategy created "Landmark : 24 Hours at the Stone Arch Bridge," an event that won "Best Public Art Performance 2006" in the Minneapolis City Pages.
Embedded in the Minneapolis dance community, Johnson served as administrator for the dance and music improvisation series Mulch, held at Intermedia Arts for three years. She currently co-curates capture!, a dance film series at the Bryant Lake Bowl, produces the experimental dance series Windfarm @ Rogue Buddha, and serves on the board of Springboard for the Arts, a nonprofit arts organization working with the business needs and career goals of artists of all disciplines.
Johnson received her BFA summa cum laude in 1998 from the University of Minnesota where she was awarded the two-year Gertrude Lippincott Scholarship for creativity and the Waller Minority Scholarship for outstanding contribution to University.
In January, 2008 she began writing a regular column, CALL & RESPONSE, about creating and viewing contemporary dance, in the online zine, Mental Contagion.
Her writing on the cultural dance traditions of the Yup'ik Eskimo people of Alaska has been published in the Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement.
Melissa Kennedy (dancer) joined Catalyst in 2001, shortly after completing degrees in dance and psychology at the University of Minnesota. Since that time she has gleefully danced with and followed Emily and Catalyst up a mountain, into a bog and into the Pacific Ocean. Melissa also works with choreographer Paula Mann and animator Steve Paul as a member of Timetrack productions, performs in site specific works by Cynthia Stevens and has danced in works by Catalyst members Vanessa Voskuil and Andrea Zimmerman. When Melissa is not dancing, she enjoys working as a pilates trainer and learning highland snare drumming.
| randy kramer • videographer/editor |
Randy Kramer (film) is an editor, media artist and videographer based in Minneapolis. Since initially editing a short Catalyst documentary in 2003, he has taken an active role in the company. His work brings new media elements to Catalyst productions and performances, most notably "Heat and Life" and the short film Wingspan 5'2". Randy’s commercial work has garnered numerous awards including an Emmy and a place in the permanent film collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Born and raised in Kentucky, Susan Scalf (dancer) moved to Minneapolis after graduating from Antioch College (Ohio) in 1992. Since she has danced for many choreographers including Paula Mann, Mathew Janczewski, Baraka de Soleil, Dylan Skybrook, Laurie van Wieren and Judith Howard. She has toured nationally with Concrete Farm Dance Collective and Hijack and internationally with Shawn McConneloug and her Orchestra. She also does a mean Mick Jagger/Joan Jett/Frankenfurterat "Dykes Do Drag," an ongoing Bryant Lake Bowl Cabaret Theater show. Susan continues to create and produce her own work, a humorous blend of athletic theatrics and dance informed by various improvisation and release techniques. She has receive da McKnight Dancer Fellowship (2000) and was City Pages Critics' Pick Best Dancer(2001.) Susan works as a trainer at her studio Pilates Uptown and as a trainer for her beloved rat terrier/chihuahua Marky Mark. She has danced for Catalyst
since 2000.
Angie Vo (costume designer) is a freelance costume designer based in Minneapolis.She began her career as a dancer with 10,000 Dances (under the late Sam Costa),and also served as Assistant Director for Young Dance (a multi-cultural children's dance company.) Transitioning from dance into costume design, she has had the pleasure of collaborating with Emily Johnson on numerous projects for Catalyst since 2000. In addition, she has designed and constructed costumes for Zenon Dance Company, Mu Daiko, Matching Tights Dance Company (GAC,) Gomez Dance Group,Time Track Production and various Minneapolis choreographers.
| andrea zimmerman • dancer |
Andrea Zimmerman (dancer) loves to dance. She also loves working as a physical therapist. She received her professional doctorate from the University of Minnesotan 2003, to add to her degrees in physiology and dance. Andrea has danced with Emily Johnson's Catalyst for over half a decade. She has had the chance to move, change and grow with many wonderful women including Natasha Hassett, Melissa Kennedy, Lillian Stillwell, Arwen Wilder, Susan Scalf, Sarah Baumert, Vanessa Voskuil and Emily Johnson, to name a few. She has danced with emerging artist Vanessa Voskuil and the Zenon Dance Company and has staged some of her own works at the University of Minnesota and Patrick's Cabaret. Andrea loves the following: knitting warm things for people, boys who always try to make her laugh, chocolate, performing in new spaces, hearing Natasha play the bass, summertime in Alaska, shopping at thrift stores, red wine, crosswords and sitting in the company of her family
and friends. |
