Tania Isaac
(PA)
2006, 2009
- A self-described kinesiophile and lover of information; physical and verbal; Tania Isaac was born in Castries, St. Lucia and although intended by educational design to enter a traditional science based field; discovered along the way a love of movement, a love of questions, a love of challenge and a desire to find a different way to be an active part of the social fabric. Since then, she has spent her career working towards a model of performance and conversation that seeks to span and deepen her interest in esthetic, cultural and academic practices. Honored as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to watch” (2006) Tania Isaac has been faculty at Bates College Dance Festival, Resident Artist at Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, and a US/JAPAN Exchange Artist through Philadelphia Dance Projects, Dance Theater Workshop and the Japan Foundation. She has received grants form the Independence Foundation, Dance Advance (a program of the Pew Charitable Trusts), The National Performance Network, the Leeway foundation, Harlemstage (formerly Aaron Davis Hall) Fund for New Work. She is the recipient of the 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship Award.
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Ms. Isaac is a former Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and a former member of Rennie Harris Puremovement, Urban Bush Women, and Li Chiao-Ping Dance. In 2006, she was a Choreographic Fellow at MANCC, creating a template for a new working process ‘open notebook’. In partnership with Francisca Plummer of Saidi Consulting (St. Lucia), Tania is also the co-founder of Imprint: Dialogues of a generation, a social action program geared towards developing conversations between youth and civic leaders. She conducts presentations as a Commonwealth Speaker with the Pennsylvania Humanities Council (PHC); presents workshops and classes; creates new work and tours internationally. Isaac has worked closely with WHYY TV and the PHC to create a segment of Humanities Live! a TV special featuring her approach to presenting Caribbean Social Dance in Historical Context. She has been adjunct faculty at Bryn Mawr College and has taught and performed in extended residencies at Bennington College (VT) and UW –Madison (WI), Virginia Commonwealth University (VA) and The Ohio State University among others. Helen, Heaven & I, a personal essay tracing the history and evolutions of Social dance forms in St. Lucia and their impact on her choreographic work, will be featured in an upcoming anthology of Dance writings. In addition, with Fluid Performance Dynamics: Caribbean Movement Esthetics in a Post-Modern Frame presented in 2008 at the International Conference of Arts and Humanities, she begins her research into creating direct links between movement, physics and linguistics.
Tania is a graduate with honors from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and received her MFA from Temple University where she served as graduate assistant and University Fellow.
in the name of
Choreographic Fellow | October 16 – 30, 2006 | August 9 – 16, 2009
Collaborator in Residence: Aaron Hyman [set designer + dramaturg]
Isaac dedicated focused research time to the writing, bibliography and movement vocabulary for in the name of. Her vision of a research vehicle was the creation of a “living notebook”, which would be designed to display written, audio, voice, and video recordings relevant to her research for this new work. Consistent community interaction with the “living notebook” through viewing, participating in creative stations, and conversation was a final goal that assisted in furthering her research investigation.
Tania Isaac returned in 2009 for MANCC’s National FORUM to re-create her “living notebook” and share current work in progress.