Robert Wood’s philosophy calls for an interdisciplinary collaboration between all elements of a production, including dance artists, musicians, and visual designers.

Associated Dance Artists:

Ling-Fen Chien. Ling-Fen is from Taiwan where she trained in Chinese Traditional Dance, as well as Ballet and Modern dance at the National Taiwan Academy of the Arts. She came to the USA in 1998 and earned a BFA in dance from Florida State University where she performed with the Dance Repertory Theater for two years under Lynda Davis. Ling-Fen also earned an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004. She has completed the certificate program at the Merce Cunningham School and was the video archival assistant to the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation. Ling-Fen has been working with Robert Wood Dance since 2004.

 

 

Rujeko Dumbuthshena. Rujeko is an experienced university and college dance instructor currently on faculty at Sarah Lawrence College teaching the fundamental aesthetics of neo-traditional African movement. As a Zimbabwean artist living in America, Rujeko has successfully been a part of innovative works and was an original ensemble member (dancer, singer, mbira player) in the Broadway musical production of FELA!. Rujeko was recently commissioned to choreograph and produce an original piece, Jenaguru as part of the Smithsonian African Art Museum’s African Cosmos exhibit.

 

 

Echo Gustafson. Echo performs, choreographs, and teaches her own work. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She sometimes performs with other companies including Catherine Cabeen and Company, Robert Wood Dance, Martha Graham Dance Company and Pearl Lang Dance Theatre. She trains teachers of GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS® and also teaches and practices Wild Goose Qigong. She is training to become a Professional Feldenkrais Practioner. As a performer and teacher, Gustafson cultivates balanced functional real-time technical expression. She has been working with Robert Wood Dance since 2010.

 

Monica Hillbrandt. A native Oregonian, Monica graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a BFA in dance in 2007. She has worked in videography and film editing since 2005 and created her first Dance for the Camera piece in 2006. Monica began working with Robert Wood Dance in 2005.

 

Annie Kohn. Annie grew up in Santa Fe, NM, where she is currently the Artistic Director of Belisama School of Contemporary Dance. She began her training at Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Moving People Dance, and under the private mentorship of Mary Anne Santos Newhall. Annie received her BFA magna cum laude in Dance with a focus on Choreography from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA. She has performed works by many respected choreographers including Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Donald Mckayle and Bebe Miller. Since returning to Santa Fe, Annie has had the pleasure of teaching at Charisma Dance School, Children’s Dance Program, Moving People Dance and National Dance Institute. She has also choreographed and performed in many independent projects, and with Meow Wolf, a local arts collective, showing work at SITE Santa Fe and the Lensic. Annie has enjoyed being a company member of Robert Wood Dance since 2010.

Mariel Lowe. Mariel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico and received her dance training at the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet School before attending both San Francisco conservatory of Dance and the Boston Ballet School. Mariel enjoys playing the cello, and in addition to dancing with Robert, she also serves as his assistant.

 

 

 

Nana Tsuda Misko. Nana Tsuda Misko was born and raised in Japan where she studied with Sumire Sho. Nana came to NYC to continue her training at the Alvin Ailey School and she later completed the Merce Cunningham Certificate. She enjoyed working with Kazuko Hirabayashi Dance Theater, Arantxa Sargadoy, Asun Noales, Iratxe Ansa, Julie Tice, H.T. Chen & Dancers, Kawamura the 3rd, Multimedia Theater Production ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’, Zuzka Kurtz, Setsuko Kawaguchi Ballet (Nagoya, Japan) among others. Nana was a founding member of Take Dance in 2004, and has been working since as a performer and to help restage his work for Universities.

 

Melissa Toogood. Melissa was born in Australia and performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on the highly acclaimed ‘Legacy Tour’. She began working with Merce as a member of the Repertory Understudy Group in November 2005. A faculty member at the Merce Cunningham Studio since 2007, she is now on faculty at Dance New Amsterdam in NYC and a guest teacher at Bard College. Melissa has assisted Robert Swinston in repertory workshops in New York and London and has taught master classes in Toronto, Miami, Minneapolis, at the Martha Graham School in NYC, and in her native city of Sydney, Australia. She was a founding member of Miro Dance Theatre, Michael Uthoff Dance Theatre and has performed in collaboration with writer Anne Carson. Melissa earned a BFA in Dance Performance from New World School of the Arts, Miami, FL, under Dean Daniel Lewis. In addition to Robert Wood Dance, she currently performs with Pam Tanowitz Dance, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener Productions, and the Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre.

 

John Hinrichs. John was born in Rochester, Illinois and graduated with a BS in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also studied dance. He joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 2009 and participated in the world Legacy Tour. John has also danced in the Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group, Kazuko Hirabayashi Dance Theatre, and Randy James Dance Works. John teaches occasionally at Dance New Amsterdam in New York, and is also engaged in a documentary project, interviewing professional dancers about the craft of dance in an effort to consolidate knowledge.

 

Daniel Madoff. Daniel was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 2007 to its conclusion in 2011 and had the pleasure of working closely with Merce on four new creations and many reconstructions, often performing the roles Merce created for himself. Daniel received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from SUNY Purchase in June 2006 and also trained at the Martha Graham School, Tisch School of the Arts, and Carver Center for the Performing Arts . In 2012 he set a Cunningham “MinEvent” in Paris, on students of the New York Dance International Summer Program under the direction of Kazuko Hirabayashi. Daniel teaches at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, and has taught master classes and workshops in New York, Washington D.C., Paris, and Mexico City. He has been hailed by the New York Times as a “live-wire, always keenly alert,” a dancer of, “striking stretch and control,” “vividly evok[ing] the rapid reversals, slow turns of the head and commanding use of the eyes that for many years were distinctive characteristics of Cunningham himself.” Elsewhere he has been described as, “stunning,” “exceptional,” “excellent,” “superlative,” having “wondrous strength and composure,” and “impeccable musicality.” He continues to dance for Kazuko Hirabayashi, Nelly van Bommel, Christopher Williams, Travis Magee, Robert Wood and Pam Tanowitz.

 

Benjamin Mielke. Ben was born in Belleville, Illinois and served with honor in the U.S. navy before earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently an MFA candidate in Dance at the University of Utah. Ben heads RWD’s aerial/flying department where he is responsible for the training, rigging and safety procedures of the flying rehearsals and all equipment. Ben is extremely thankful personally that dancing has allowed him to travel the world to learn from artists such as Robert Wood, Andrea Miller, Twyla Tharp, Meredith Monk, Ralph Lemon, Mark Morris, Pilobolus, Germaul Barnes and Anna Saphosnikov.

 

 

Miles Tokunow. Miles is a multimedia storyteller. He is both an artist and educator. Currently a Masters Candidate at Highlands University in Las Vegas,NM, Miles is interested in creating interactive performance spaces combining dance, film and sound. He has previously worked and performed with Rachel Boggia, Emilee Lorde and Sarah Ashkin. His dance background is in Delicious Movements having studied with Eiko at Wesleyan University and butoh with Oguri in Los Angeles. Since graduating Wesleyan, Miles has worked at and with non-profits in Santa Fe teaching elementary, high school and college students how to tell their own stories through different forms of media. He is currently in the process of starting his own non-profit that focuses on social change through multimedia performance.

 

Raoul Trujillo. Raoul danced internationally with the Nikolais Dance Theater from 1980 to 1986, where he also learned master lighting design. He was the original choreographer and co-director of the American Indian Dance Theater. Raoul continued to explore native mythology and created an Indigenous dance language and dance barre with Alejandro Ronceria in Banff (Canada) for the Aboriginal Dance Project . His work “The Shaman’s Journey” was turned into a dance film for PBS, along with Alive From Off Center and he also hosted and narrated the series Dancing for PBS. Raoul has performed at the Kennedy Center for the Arts, taught at the Banff Centre for Aboriginal Arts, and has been a mentor, dancer and choreographer to the Santa Fe-based Native company DANCING EARTH and KAHAW’II Dance Theatre in Toronto. He has also worked extensively as an actor in film and television, and continues to dance and choreograph. He recently worked as a choreographer and principal actor in “The New World”; as historic Chief Red Cloud in Spielberg’s series ‘Into The West’, and held featured roles in “True Blood,” “Tin Man,” “Love Ranch,” “Ancestor Eyes,” and in Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” for which he won a North American Indigenous Image Award for Best Actor.

 

Music:

Original composition by John King: John is a composer, guitarist and violist. His commissions include: the Kronos Quartet, Red (an orchestra), Ethel, the Albany Symphony (“Dogs of Desire”), Bang On A Can All-Stars, Mannheim Ballet, New York City Ballet/Diamond Project, Stuttgart Ballet, Ballets de Monte Carlo, as well as the Merce Cunningham Dance Co. His string quartets have also been performed by the Eclipse Quartet (LA) and the Mondriaan Quartet (Amsterdam). His quartet Crucible has premiered many of his compositions at The Stone (June 2007) and The Kitchen (April 2009). John and Robert performed together with Merce Cunningham Dance Company and first collaborated in 1992. John King’s compositions, live performance and develop-mental presence are vital to the interdisciplinary artistic goals of The Coreografia Project.

 

Original Sound Design by Robert Miller: Robert is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. He began his professional career as a staff member at California Institute of the Arts, working with Morton Subotnick as a sound engineer for the film department. From 1988 to 1992 he produced original sound designs for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Foundation, working closely with John Cage and David Tudor. Until 1999 he served as the audio production supervisor for the department of theater, film and television at UCLA then at the Yale School of Drama, and most recently at Savannah College of Art and Design. His outstanding work includes the recording and production of David Tudor’s revolutionary composition “Rainforest,” a CD and historical retrospective of Tudor’s distinguished work. Mr. Miller has composed electronic music for many feature length films, developing the first high-definition video interactive work with the Disney and Sony corporations. Rob continues to advance his work through audio consultancy and sound design for arts organizations, including the Getty Museum, The Los Angeles Music Center, the 1984 Olympics Art Festival, the Japan-American Theater, Los Angeles, Robert Wood Dance, and National Public Radio.

 

Live percussion by Gregg Johnson. Gregg is an innovator in modern hand drumming and percussion, synthesizing the musical traditions of India within contemporary classical contexts of ‘junk’ and ‘found object’ percussion. Gregg is an award winning composer for theatre and film, having received a Dramalogue Critic’s Circle award for sound design and performance in a score for Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis at the Mark Taper Forum. He composed and performed for multiple seasons of the LA Music Center’s Improvisational Theatre Project and for THEATREWORKS’ Pericles, Prince of Tyre and A `Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 

Visual Design:

Visual Design by Patricia Morgan. Patricia’s art practice began in 1983 with wearable and body art in which she engaged with notions of performativity focusing on the alteration, through costume and other applications to the body, of the conventional sense of the human body. After working at UCLA, Los Angeles (1990) in their departments of Design and Film she became interested in video and for a short period engaged with semi surrealistic narratives, which she illustrated with ‘costumes’ made from conventional and industrial materials. Most recently she has been working on short one-shot videos of moments she finds in Nature when light and form combine in contemplative rhythms. Currently she is completing a PhD in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia in which she is investigating the links between contemplation and learning.

 

Lighting Design by Davison Scandrett. Profile coming soon…