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PROGRAM 2
Friday, February 6 @ 7 pm
● Alison Cook Beatty Dance, NY
● Le Ballet Fou, NY
● Cara Marguerite Collective, NY
● HYEONWOO BAE, Korea
● Yu-Hsien Hsueh, Spain
● Julia Weber, NY
● Violet Danse, TX
● P2, PA
● Jin-Wen Yu Dance, WI
● Kat Reese Dance, NJ
● Joel K. Linebach & Bird Thurman OH
● Eric Mullis Projects NC
Alison Cook Beatty Dance © Russ Haydn
Founded in 2012 and anchored in New York City, Alison Cook Beatty Dance is a 501(c)(3) artist-led modern dance company dedicated to creating powerful work that bridges classical technique and contemporary vision. Under the artistic leadership of choreographer Alison Cook Beatty, the Company explores the universal human condition through movement—investigating themes of identity, connection, and transformation with emotional urgency and technical clarity. Many of the Company’s works have received national and international recognition, through commissioned performances, collaborations, and festival presentations.
In Spring 2026, the Company will present Bist du bei Mir, Through the Panes, a striking new duet which bridges the sacred and the visceral. Set to J.S. Bach’s “Bist du bei Mir,” this piece delicately examines threshold moments of pain, companionship, and transcendence, inviting audiences into a space where vulnerability becomes art. Through this work and beyond, Alison Cook Beatty Dance affirms the power of movement to speak to our shared resilience and hope.
Le Ballet Fou is a dance company established in 2020 in NYC.
Specializing in spectacles of dance, storytelling and song- through the CM discipline, we rejoice in the exploration of movement narratives and structural metaphors. In between immersive theater and concert dance we operate from our speakeasy - the lofty mole. We will present an excerpt of The Birth of the Ghost for the SoloDuo Festival 2026.
Le Ballet Fou © Noa Griffel
Cara Marguerite Collective © Joelle Martinez
Cara Marguerite (she/her) is originally from Los Angeles, CA. She holds a Bachelors in Dance from Cal State Fullerton. Most notably she has performed with Sokolow Dance Theatre Ensemble, as a trainee with Jose Limon Institute at the Joyce and 92nd Y, at Judson Church with Natalia Fernandez’s company, and Kanopy Dance in Madison, WI. While choreographing, Cara is interested in dwelling on the beauty of life, keeping childlike curiosities, investigating religious structures, and using dance for social justice.
“Am I my brother's keeper / I see six crows” is a personal practice of processing a series of nightmares. The title draws from two stories. The first, is from the biblical story of Cain and Abel. The second, from Rome's origin story of Romulus and Remus.
HYEONWOO BAE graduated from the Department of Dance Performance, School of Dance, Korea National University of Arts, majoring in practical arts and contemporary dance. He is currently expected to graduate from the MFA program in contemporary dance at the same institution.From 2019/2020 to 2020/2021, he was a member of Stadttheater Pforzheim in Germany, and from 2021/2022 to 2022/2023, he was a member of Staatstheater Kassel, Tanz Kassel. During his time in these companies, he collaborated with various international choreographers and toured across Europe.
Currently, he is also a member of LDP Dance Project (Laboratory Dance Project) and participates in Kimsunghoon Dance Project. Through his work, which combines elements of expressionism, realism, and theater, he continues to explore and develop his own distinctive dance language. In this piece, the artist expresses himself actively and freely without reservation or any preset frames. Like a street clown, he wants the audience to see him as the way he is without trying to define the intended meanings.
HYEONWOO BAE ©
Yu-Hsien Hsueh © Hank Shih
Yu-Hsien Hsueh, the first Taiwanese dancer ever to join the Ballet Nacional de España, competed in Spain’s most prestigious event — the 33rd Spanish Dance and Flamenco Choreography Competition (33 Certamen Coreográfico de Danza Española y Flamenco). She not only won the First Prize for Solo Choreography (Primer Premio a una Coreografía de Solo) but was also awarded Outstanding Female Dancer of the Year (Premio Bailarina Sobresaliente).
About "Risa y Olvido"："Once and again, in the deepest abyss,
you try to find yourself—once and again. Endless dreams.
I wake up naked; the cold wind devours my hopes,
freezing my longing for light into an endless torment."
— Yu Hsien Hsueh
Life can only grow resilience under constant devastation.
I hope that courage can still be found to withstand repeated pain. For this reason—because life must have something worth fighting for— one must live for others, with the bravery to reflect and to love. For many times, courage is not for oneself;
yet through loving others, one begins to understand how to love oneself. Has art always been so powerful? No—its power comes from belief, from the faith that sustains it. It is powerful because it is necessary, and therefore it becomes eternal in this world.
Polish native, Julia Weber, is a graduate of the Juilliard School in New York where she received the Hector Zaraspe Prize for Choreographic Promise. At Juilliard, she choreographed for Choreographers and Composers 2022, Senior Production 2025, and was selected for Juilliard Choreographic Honors in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, Julia choreographed a 3-movement piece forthe Traverse City Dance Project and her piece Everlasting Memory was selected for the 24thAnnual DUMBO Dance Festival. In 2023 and 2024, she received the first place award in the Polish Choreographic Competition, ZAiKS. Julia has been named Young Dancer of the Year, Artistic Hope, and Young Talent and was honored with several awards from the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage. In October 2025, she choreographed on New York City Ballet for the New York Choreographic Institute.
In her piece, Ballade, she I aims to express one’s journey of love and human connection. She envisions that the wide range of colors in the music combined with the beauty of dance would touch the hearts of others and provide them with new perspectives on art.
Julia Weber ©
Violet Danse © Lynn Lane
“French sex” and “American sadness.” Both stereotypes flatten, fetishize, and script the body to trace the seams between: where desire becomes performance and melancholy becomes currency. It moves through the complicated seduction of being seen and the quiet violence of being misread. It asks what becomes of us when we are only a mirror for someone else’s longing. Violet Moon (they/them) is a polymathic performance artist, feminist choreographer, and working mental health professional whose work is recognized for its visceral intimacy, emotional precision, and technical rigor. With a decade of professional performance and touring across the U.S. and Europe, Violet has been invited to develop research and movement inquiry at renowned institutions, including P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), Hubbard Street Dance (Chicago), and Le Centre National de la Danse (Paris) with their practice intertwining post-disciplinary dance, relational performance, and experiential trauma healing.
Eduardo Hernandez is a Los Angeles based dancer and choreographer. His work is heavily influenced by absurdism and iconoclasm themes that constantly bring delusions or challenges as an acknowledgement for self being. As a result, his movement practice centralizes in improvisation or set choreography based on error-chance choices in order to bring authenticity or purposeless experiences.
His work DAESEIN from the German philosophical word “Dasein,” translates to presence or existence, yet it is a piece about the absurdism of living while it manifests a hopeful outcome. In addition, DAESEIN is an exploration work based on the Humphrey principles and the somatic principles of release.
Constance Nicolas Vellozzi © Athena Azzevedo
Gianna and Paula (P2) are both senior Dance majors with concentrations in Performance and Choreography at Slippery Rock University. They became inseparable at the beginning of their college journey and have since created multiple works together. Over the past few years, they have deepened their understanding of various dance genres at SRU. Coincidentally, this duet was created in their Laban Movement Analysis course. It stems from Paula’s experience as a woman in Latin America and Gianna’s desire to uplift the movement by utilizing research and collaborating with Paula’s perspicacity. Ni Una Menos (Not One (Woman) Less) is a feminist movement born in Argentina, now present in most Latin American countries, out of the frustration of gender-based violence and murder.
This duet displays a journey of sisterhood, grief, and resistance by two women fighting for those who no longer have a voice of their own.
P2© Ben Viatori
Jin-Wen Yu Dance©
JIN-WEN YU, EDD & MFA, has created, performed, directed, and produced over 100 works in the Americas and Asia. Before his study in the USA, he was a soloist for the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. Dr. Yu is a six-time gala concert winner of the American College Dance Association Conference. As the President of World Dance Alliance-Americas 2009-2013, he directed dance festivals in Madison, New York City, and Vancouver/Canada. In 1999, he founded the Madison-based Jin- Wen Yu Dance and has presented an annual concert at Madison since. The company has performed in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Paris/France, Edinburg/Scotland, Tokyo/Japan, Guatemala City/Guatemala, Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, Taipei/Taiwan, Seoul/Korea, Hong Kong/China, among others.
“Still Demanding" is an excerpted duet from the 40-minute work, Resonate, a piece that examines our collective search for harmony and connection in a post-COVID world. This duet embodies the insistence for change.
Kat Reese is a dancer, choreographer, and teaching artist originally from New Jersey. In her work, Kat often explores themes of connection and community through a wide spectrum of movement from subtle to explosive, and incorporates elements of improvisational scoring and real-time decision making. In her work, Torrent, Kat utilizes the imagery of a rainstorm to trace a path toward resilience, starting from a defeated state to find the willingness to stand, fight, release, and become stronger for it. Kat has danced with numerous companies and choreographers including The Equus Projects, Brit Falcon, Monteleone Dance, Salvatore LaRussa, and The Kennedy Dancers Repertory Company, and has experience as a dancer, rehearsal director, and guest choreographer. She has also performed her own work in venues including Art House Productions, Dixon Place, Alchemical Theater Lab, and Triskelion Arts. Kat has her BFA in dance from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Kat Reese Dance © Zoltan Suhay
Joel K. Linebach & Bird Thurman © Kiersten Conway
Bird Thurman and Joel K. Linebach are emerging artists based in Northeast Ohio, graduating from Purdue Univeristy with degrees in aerospace engineering and dance and from Case Western Reserve University with degrees in plastic engineering and dance, respectively. While also navigating their career’s as independent artists, they also perform with Inlet Dance Theatre, a Cleveland-based contemporary dance company, as company members.
“Cairn” is a duet inspired by human-made stacks of stones often used for navigation, helping travelers through landscapes where paths are unclear. Linebach and Thurman create and dismantle their own visceral cairn-like sculptures to embody their journey at this time in life as young, emerging artists. They explore the interplay of precariousness and stability - fragility and durability. Aligning with their physics-based backgrounds, Linebach and Thurman utilize the mechanical fundamentals of non-traditional partnering to take the audience on a new journey - traveling forward into the unexpected.
Eric Mullis Projects is a project-based company based in Charlotte, North Carolina that explores the intersection of contemporary dance and emerging technology. The group's work has been presented at the North Carolina Dance Festival, the Breaking Ground Festival, the touring Dance City Festival, and elsewhere. In 2026, the group will present at the international ArtsinTank Festival in Seoul, Korea. For more see ericmullis8.com
Eric Mullis projects Virginia Dunn © Virginia Dunn