Partnering
power and leverage, frame and grip

Gravity and levity, weight-sharing, power and leverage, frame and grip, rhythm and momentum, velocity and suspension. Practice through the training of common and uncommon skills, learning repertory and improvisational structures, generating material together to enhance strength, timing, precision, communication and performance.


Kathleen Hermesdorf
Kathleen Hermesdorf has been dancing in San Francisco since 1991. She co-directed Hermesdorf & Wells Dance Company with Scott Wells, sharing a GOLDIE Award in 1994, and was a member of Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, receiving an Isadora Duncan Award in 1999. She worked with Contraband/Sara Shelton Mann from 1993-2003 and joined Bebe Miller Company in 2002. Hermesdorf is the Artistic Director, with Musical Director Albert Mathias, of Motion Lab (www.motion-lab.net), an experiment of movement and sound in training, creative process, performance and production. They have been on the faculty of ODC School since 1996 and the company has presented four critically acclaimed seasons, released five CDs and toured much of the USA, teaching performing and setting commissions, since 1998. Hermesdorf holds a BFA and MFA in Dance and certification from the San Francisco Shiatsu Institute and has trained intensively in somatic, improvisational, technique-based and compositional forms. She has been called ".....possibly the most vibrant dancer currently working in the Bay Area.....liquid, lightning fast and moving from deep inside herself, she is a wonder to behold." by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the San Francisco Examiner finds her work ".....all-enveloping.....pure shape, partnered with an even purer dynamism, that arrests the imagination."

Stephanie Maher
Stephanie Maher is known for her breathtaking physicality and for creating works that express an unique blend of intimacy, sensitivity, and wild humor. Her work has been performed on stages across the US, Germany, Holland and the UK. After training in New York, she spent 10 years in San Francisco, working from 1989-1993 as a dancer/choreographic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. In 1995 she co-founded CORE with Keith Hennessy, Jess Curtis Stanya Kahn and Jules Beckman, and was a regular at 848 Community Space, often collaborating with San Francisco dancer/ choreographer Kathleen Hermesdorf. In 1998 she relocated to Berlin where she continues to perform, organize, and teach in K77 Studios and the Ponderosa in Stolzenhagen, Germany, both of which she helped build and develop. Kathleen Hermesdorf and Stephanie Maher met in San Francisco via Contact Improvisation in 1992. They were choreographic collaborators and performers in the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and together as Collusion from 1993-1997 and have been teaching and making work in and around Berlin and San Francisco since 2000 at K77, Tanz Fabrik, Potsdam International TanzTage Festival and Intercontinental Collaborations, presented by Jess Curtis/Gravity Productions. Most recently, they performed in the San Francisco International Arts Festival 2005 and were featured at the 2006 Ponderosa Tanz/Land Festival in Stolzenhagen, Germany.