Jason Bush

Jason Bush is a new Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies at Stanford. He completed his PhD in Theatre at Ohio State University in 2011, with a research focus on the global circulation of indigenous Peruvian dance. His current research focuses on the staging of the Peruvian scissors dance, a highly acrobatic form of male competitive dance, as an icon of Andean identity on the global stage. Jason is very happy to share these research interests and learn from the Stanford community.

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Diane Frank

After completing a B.F.A in Theater (Ohio University) and an M.A. in Dance (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), Diane Frank taught for four years in the Dance Department at the University of Maryland, where she was a founding member of the Maryland Dance Theater. She then moved to New York City to begin an eleven-year career with Douglas Dunn and Dancers, touring nationally and internationally. As a scholarship student, she was invited by Merce Cunningham to join the teaching staff of the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, where she taught for eight years. At Cunningham’s request, she taught both technique and repertory at the American Center’s Atelier Cunningham in Paris. A frequent guest teacher at the Paris Opera, she assisted Douglas Dunn in both the creation of new work for the Opera and the setting of established repertory. Frank has been the recipient of seven NEA Choreography Fellowships for collaborative choreographic projects with Deborah Riley, as well as commissions from the Jerome Foundation, DTW, Dance Bay Area, and Meet the Composer, and Arts Silicon Valley. Her work has been performed both in the United States and abroad.

At Stanford since 1988, Frank teaches intermediate and advanced modern technique, choreography, and mentors graduate and undergraduate student dance projects. She organizes and advises Stanford’s student participation in the American College Dance Festival as well as other Divisional dance education and performance projects on- and off-campus. She is the Co-Director of the Dance Division's annual concert. She also organizes numerous choreographic commissions by guest artists for Stanford student dancers, frequently acting as Rehearsal Director, setting and maintaining works by choreographers as diverse as Elizabeth Streb, Holly Johnston, Brenda Way, Parijat Desai, Hope Mohr, Janice Garrett, among others. In 2005, she played a significant role in the development of Stanford Lively Arts’ campus-wide interdisciplinary arts event “Encounter: Merce,” organizing its “Music and Dance by Chance” commissions, as well as an IHUM lecture series on Cunningham’s video dances and concert repertory. She has twice taught Cunningham repertory in Stanford workshop classes.

Frank has been instrumental in developing a number of residency projects and artistic collaborations for the Dance Division. Highlights include: the repertory reconstruction project of Anna Halprin’s "Myths"; Hope Mohr's "Under the skin," a collaborative performance project bringing together artists, physicians and residents from the Medical School, and community performers; Elizabeth Streb's "Crash" performed with Streb's company on Stanford's Memorial Auditorium stage; and "Cantor:Rewired," site-specific outdoor iterations of Parijat Desai's work fusing Southeast Asian classical Indian dance with post-Modern choreographic strategies. Originally performed throughout the galleries and grounds of Stanford's Cantor Arts Center, this work was most recently performed at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum in May 2010. in Spring 2010, she assisted Ann Carlson in the organization of her walking performance event, "Still Life with Decoy". In 2011, she is assisting in the reconstruction of Anna Sokolow's signature masterpiece, "Rooms". Frank also teaches “The Duets Project,” a performance class that examines partnering through duet repertory. Strongly interested in site-specific performance, Frank has taught the theory course “Figure/Ground: Site-Specific Dance Performance in Outdoor Environments.” Complementing this course, she conceived and organized "Red Rover," a series of commissioned site-specific dance performances traveling the grounds of Stanford campus. Frank instituted and currently directs the Firework Series, a quarterly informal showing of student work followed by discussion among artists and audience. She also conceived and organized the Bay Area Dance Exchange, a day-long intensive hosted by Stanford for Bay Area college and university dance programs; eight schools gather to share studio practices, creative processes, and performances of works. Frank's recent choreography includes the site-specific duet "Cleave," from which she developed a video dance with film maker David Alvarado, as well as "Sea Change," a series of duets. Her current work, "Twilight Composite" will be performed at the American College Dance Festival in March 2012. Frank is a frequent guest teacher at Bay Area dance studios, colleges, and universities. A strong proponent of arts education, she consults and volunteers in the development of dance and live arts activities for public schools and the community. She has also directed the Dance Division’s summer dance intensive for high school students through US Performing Arts. Frank is Acting Director of the Dance Division for the Academic Year 2011-12.

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Aleta Hayes

Aleta Hayes is a contemporary dancer, choreographer, performer, and teacher. Before her appointment at Stanford, Ms. Hayes taught for eight years at Princeton University in the Program in Theater and Dance and the Program in African American Studies. While at Princeton, Ms. Hayes developed pedagogically innovative courses that combined cultural and performance history, theory, and performance. She has also taught at Wesleyan University, Swarthmore College, and Rutgers University. Ms. Hayes holds an M.F.A. in Dance and Choreography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A., with Departmental Honors, in Drama, Dance and the Visual Arts from Stanford University (1991). 
Aleta Hayes lived and worked in New York City for fifteen years, choreographing solo and group dance pieces, in which her performances often interpolated acting and singing. Highlights include: Hatsheput, presented at the Place Theater, London and St. Marks Church, New York; Tarantantara, presented at Jacob’s Pillow; and La Chanteuse Nubienne (written by playwright Daniel Alexander Jones), performed for Movement Research at Judson Church. Ms. Hayes collaborated, as choreographer and dance/vocal soloist, with the poet Yusef Komunyakaa and composer William Banfield, on Ish-Scoodah, a chamber opera with dance about the nineteenth century African American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis. She also had leading roles in major works by other artists such as Jane Comfort (the trip-hop dance/opera Asphalt, with a book by Carl Hancock Rux) and Robert Wilson (the opera The Temptation of St Anthony, with gospel and other African American spiritual music forms and libretto by Bernice Johnson Reagon). Ms. Hayes has continued to perform in the subsequent international presentations of The Temptation of St Anthony. 
In 2004, Ms. Hayes returned to Stanford on a Ford Foundation Resident Dialogues Fellowship through the Committee on Black Performing Arts, for which she created The Wedding Project, a performance piece of multiple genres illustrating the evolution of American social dance through the narrative of African American wedding traditions. She extended this "theater of mixed forms" (the critic Anna Kisselgoff’s term) into community dialogue when she was a 2005 Peninsula Community Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Eastside Preparatory School in East Palo Alto. That residence culminated in The ReMix Project, where she collaborated with students to create and perform a montage of music, monologue, and movement examining student aspirations in a low-income, racially-mixed neighborhood. 
Since 2005, Ms. Hayes has had many leading roles as a dancer, singer and actor including, most notably: Suzan-Lori Park’s In the Blood, directed by Prof. Harry Elam, (2005): In the spring of 2006, she choreographed, danced, spoke, and sang a multimedia solo piece, Deianeira (an adoption of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis) created for Ms. Hayes and directed by Drama and Classics Professor Rush Rehm: She created a solo piece, Califia, which developed out of an residency at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program (2007), and a Stanford Humanities Lab Grant/Fellowship (2006) in collaboration with CCRMA-Center for Computer Music and Acoustics (involving human computer interaction): She wrote, sang, acted, and co-directed an original work in the Stanford Drama Department based on T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland titled, Wasteland in Black and White (2009).
The Chocolate Heads Movement Band, founded by Hayes in 2009 to the present, is a platform for performers of many genres. The troupe’s name is a descriptor for a “movement driven band” comprised of dancers, musicians, visual artists, performance poets and writers—referencing both dance and social movement as motivating forces for the work. In 2011, the Chocolate Heads were invited to perform at STAN: Society, Technology, Art and Nature—a prototype TED X talk at Stanford University.
Hayes’ latest dance-music performance installation, ‘Singing the Rooms-Performance of the Everyday’, is a collaboration with New York based composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist, Cooper Moore—a dramatic song cycle to be performed by her and collaborators in different domesticated spaces.

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Muriel Maffre

Born in Enghien-les Bains, France, Muriel Maffre received her ballet training from the Paris Opéra Ballet School and Paris National Conservatory of Music from which she graduated with a Premier Prix with honors. Prior to joining the San Francisco Ballet as a Principal Dancer in 1990, Muriel danced with the Hamburg Ballet and Monte-Carlo Ballet. Muriel is Chevalier in the French order of Arts and Lettres. She is a Gold Medalist from Paris 1st International Ballet Competition, and the recipient of two Isadora Duncan Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Individual Performance for both 1990 and 2002 repertory season performances with the San Francisco Ballet. Muriel performed leading roles in the romantic, classical and contemporary repertory. She also created roles in ballet by major present-day choreographers. She toured extensively and made guest appearances in eminent theaters in America, Europe, Russia and Asia. Muriel holds a B.A. in Performing Arts and an MA in Museum Studies. Muriel retired from the San Francisco Ballet with a Farewell Gala on May, 6th 2007. Since, she has been involved in dance education and public humanities.

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Richard Powers

Richard Powers is one of the world's foremost experts in American social dance. He has been researching and teaching contemporary and historic social dances for over thirty years and is currently a full-time instructor at Stanford University. Richard has also taught workshops in Paris, Rome, Prague, London, Venice, Geneva, St. Petersburg and Tokyo as well as across the U.S. and Canada.

Selected by the Centennial Issue of Stanford Magazine as one of Stanford University's most notable graduates of its first century. Awarded the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for distinctive and exceptional contributions to education at Stanford University. Teaches American social dance forms and historic social dance. Joined the Dance Faculty in 1992.

Richard's Home Page: http://richardpowers.com.

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