The Company AMDaT is a New York based ensemble of dancers and designers
established in 1998 by Swiss born director/choreographer, visual artist
and performer Andrea Haenggi. The company is dedicated to creating visual motion constructions,
live performances of contemporary dance that cross
boundaries between art disciplines (video, film, architecture) and
technology and find new possibilities for presentations in nontraditional
sites and theaters.
The company has been presented internationally in Germany, Switzerland,
the Czech Republic, Canada and in a 4-week residency with
performances at the TSEH Russian Dance Platform in Moscow. U.S. venues
include Dance Theater Workshop, the World Financial Center, the Lower
Manhattan Cultural Center's Sitelines Festival, the Cooper Hewitt
Museum, MASS MoCA, the Ohio Theater, the Swiss Peaks Festival, the
European Dream Festival, DanceNow, the Boston/Ideas in Motion Festival,
the Open for Dancing Festival, and self produced works in low income
neighborhoods.
Andrea Haenggi, winner of a 2005 DTW Digital Fellowship, has taught
her "Body is the Screen" Workshop and given master classes in New York
City, Canada, Russia and Switzerland.
It is very valuable for The Company to have the chance to share our creative research with
other artists and the wider communities in which we live & work. Residency activities such
as workshops, movement master classes, artist talks and other outreach programs are a
fundamental part of AMDaT's work in the U.S and abroad, and continue to inspire and inform
Haenggi's movement and visual research.
This visual motion construction should shed new meaning on our sense of space - of our own
location in the world. Every wall, every corner, every chunk of flaking paint, every flickering shadow thus becomes part of the performance.
Andrea Haenggi, a New York-based Swiss born a choreographer, visual artist,
performer and the artistic director/founder of AMDaT, a Dance Arts Company that
creates and produces live-performances of visual motion
constructions: site-specific dance video installations
and multimedia stage works that combine contemporary dance with
visual art, prosaic architecture, and technology. The winner of a
2005 Digital Arm Fellowship from Dance Theater Workshop, Ms. Haenggi was
recently commissioned by World Financial Center Arts & Events to present
with her Company AMDaT her new work, escalator, specially designed for
the public lobbies of the World Financial Center Complex in New York City
in March 2006.
Ms. Haenggi pursued professional dance studies at the Jutta Klamt
School and CH-Tanztheater in Zurich and continued her training at
the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York City.
After concluding her studies, she performed with many diverse
companies, but the biggest influence on her current concept of
choreography is Alien Action, Erin McGonigle's series of
performance-invasions in unusual locations in New York from 1996-1998.
Meanwhile, Haenggi continued to pursue her longtime passion for visual
art, which she sees as another sort of dance,
"moving colors around within the square of a canvas".
One day she asked herself: What happens to the experience of a digital
image or a painting if it moves like a dancer? This was the genesis of
the complex dance/art installations she calls visual motion constructions,
and resulted in the birth of her first production, al+one in a room with her
company AMDaT (Andrea Maria Dance art Technology) in 1998. She was immediately
invited to restage the work at MASS Mo CA, one of America's leading contemporary
art museums. The founding of AMDaT has led Haenggi to eight years of artistic
activity in which she has created nine full-length works, numerous shorter
pieces, and a series of community residencies in which she continues to
discover her unique voice through the meeting points between movement,
video imagery, and architecture. Her work has been presented by festivals
and presenting organizations in the United States, Russia, Switzerland,
Canada and the Czech Republic.
As AMDaT's Artistic Director, Haenggi has collaborated with numerous arts
presenters, musicians, designers and a core group of 4 to 7 dancers to create
and produce visual motion constructions. In the past few years, she has focused
increasingly on creating site-integrated dance video installations for
non-traditional and public spaces. In 2004, she created the critically-acclaimed
under whose control, co-produced by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and
presented as part of LMCC's SiteLines Festival in an abandoned retail store.
In 2005, Haenggi was invited by TSEH Dance Agency in Russia to participate in
the Russian Dance Theater Festival TSEH05. This involved a rigorous 4-week
residency that culminated in a series of performances at the Moscow State
Museum The New Tretyakov Gallery. Other public installation works include
blast wall art (2005) for the Commodore Barry Park handball courts in
Brooklyn, squaring the circle (2001), a community project for Brooklyn's
Maria Hernandez Park, and echo chamber (1999) created for a squatter house
in Prague, Czech Republic.
Haenggi is in the process of choreographing Friction with her company AMDaT;
the piece is a new site-integrated multi media stage work with a commissioned
score by David Linton. The work is commissioned and will be presented by Dance
Theater Workshop in October 2006. She has also been commissioned by Island Moving
Company (Newport, RI) to create a site-specific work for their company to be
presented during the Newport Festival "Opening for Dancing" in September 2006.
She has taught body is the screen - her choreographic lab workshop at
the Performing Arts Center Tanzhaus Wasserwerk in Zurich, Switzerland,
Dance Step Studio, London Ontario, and at the On View Studio, Brooklyn, NYC.
Haenggi received an artistic and Company residency at the White Oak Plantation
funded by the Howard Gilman Foundation (2005/06) and Tanzhaus Wasserwerk, Zurich,
Switzerland.
Uta Takemura received her B.F.A. from the State University of New York at
Purchase and her M.F.A. from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts
where she was a recipient of the Seidman Award for Dance. She has performed
with various choreographers in New York City and has taught in Spain, France
and Portugal. She currently dances with Mark Morris Dance Group, FREEFALL,
and Wil Swanson/DanceWorks and joined AMDaT in Janurary 2006.
Oceane McCord - Dancer
click om image to zoom
photo by Andrea Haenggi
Oceane McCord hails from California where she began her dance training at Idyllwild Arts Academy.
She recieved her B.F.A. in Dance from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA. Since moving to
New York in 2004 she had worked with Shen Wei Dance Arts and Peter Pucci Plus Dancers.
Candice Schnurr - Dancer
click om image to zoom
photos by Andrea Haenggi
Candice Schnurr began her early dance training at the Houston Ballet Academy and
the High School for Performing and Visual Arts where she was greatly influenced
by Priscilla Nathan-Murphy. She went on to earn her BFA from the SUNY Purchase
Dance Conservatory studying composition and Klein Technique with Neil Greenberg.
Since graduating, she has had the pleasure of dancing in the companies of Wil
Swanson and Ellis Wood.
Einy Aam - Dancer
click om image to zoom
photos by Chris Woltmann
Einy Aam received her BA (Hons) from London Contemporary Dance School in 2001, and
has worked with AMDaT since March 2004. While in New York she has also performed for
Noemie Lafrance in two productions of the Bessie Award winning Descent (2002 and 2003)
and in Noir (2004). In Norway, she recently choreographed and performed for the musical
concert Tree of Tenderness by composer Magnar Aam, and has also collaborated with Torill
Haugen on the dance films "From Dust till Dawn" and "Here, in the Resurrection" and is
featured in Marco Ruffatti's dance film "Linescapes v.! Norway."
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