Open Rehearsal with Molissa Fenley and Company

About Molissa Fenley and Company

Molissa Fenley has created 80 works during her continuing career. With her company, Molissa Fenley and Company, founded in 1977, and as a soloist working in collaboration with visual artists and composers, her work has been performed throughout the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Her work has been commissioned by the American Dance Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the Dia Art Foundation, Jacob’s Pillow, the Joyce Theater, the Kitchen, Lincoln Center, the New National Theater of Tokyo, The National Institute of Performing Arts in Seoul, New York Live Arts and many others. Molissa has also created many works on ballet and contemporary dance companies, most recently for Barnard/Columbia, Oakland Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet and Repertory Dance Theater. The Danforth Professor of Dance at Mills College, she is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Fellow of the Bogliasco Foundation, a Master Artist of the Atlantic Center of the Arts, and the recipient of two Asian Cultural Council residencies in Japan. Rhythm Field: The Dance of Molissa Fenley, has just been published by Seagull Press (2015).

Christiana Axelsen (Dancer) has been dancing with Molissa Fenley since 2013. She assists Molissa in reconstructing major repertory works and has served as a rehearsal director setting Molissa’s work on Oakland Ballet and Repertory Dance Theater in Salt Lake City. She currently dances for Christopher Williams, Courtney Krantz and Pam Tanowitz and has had the pleasure to work with Beth Gill, zoe|juniper, Michou Szabo, Dai Jian, Anne Zuerner, Mana Kawamura, Dylan Crossman and Korhan Basaran among others. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude with a degree in dance and geology from Mount Holyoke College and is a graduate of the Merce Cunningham Professional Training Program where she performed alongside the Repertory Understudy Group.

Rebecca Chaleff (Dancer) is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. As a dancer, she has performed with Pat Catterson, Douglas Dunn and Dancers, and the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group, among others. She is also currently a member of GERALDCASELDANCE. Rebecca began dancing with Molissa Fenley and Company in 2012.