by Free Fleet

Collaborators:

Miryam Coppersmith is a performance artist who aims to create spaces for transformation for her collaborators, audience, and greater community. She works with movement, speech, and sound coming from her own body, drawing on training in Contact Improvisation, Six Viewpoints, acting, vernacular social dance, and other influences. Miryam holds a BA in Dance and Creative Writing from Oberlin College. She was a 2020 Get What You Need artist in residence and has presented work at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, You Can't Fail, Fresh Juice Fresh and more. Miryam works as a Jewish educator and is a writer and editor for the online dance journal thINKingDANCE. miryamcoppersmith.com

 

Joye Giuffre (they/them) is a performance artist and movement instructor from New Jersey. Joye is currently a member of STREB’s Action Opportunity Program and is currently interested in dance as athleticism. A University of the Arts 2020 graduate, Joye has worked with Marguerite Hemmings, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Jesse Zarritt, and Paul Mattenson. Credits include 1975 by Boris Charmatz for The Philadelphia Museum of Dance, performances with the Mascher Space Cooperative: Free Fleet directed by Curt Haworth and Loren Gronendaal, and Freespace Dance’s 2021 Summer Season. A teacher of acrobatics and dance for ages K-12, Joye’s movement practice and teaching method revolve around finding ease inside of vigorous dancing and guiding young dancers to access their authenticity by recognizing their individual strengths.

 

O. Fern is a Philadelphia based multidisciplinary creator, dancer, aerialist, poet, and experimental fibers artist. Originally from Rhode Island, O graduated from the University of the Arts in 2020 with a BFA in Dance and focus in Fibers. O enjoys experimenting with extreme colors and textures to create a sensory experience for the viewer, and transform performance spaces into illuminated installation-like rooms. O’s work is heavily influenced by nature, specifically deep-sea organisms and fungi, using themes of gender and sexuality to challenge conventional ideas and subvert popular culture. O has performed with artists such as Sidra Bell, Jesse Zarrit, Curt Haworth & Tim Motzer, as well as AJ Harper Dance Project. Currently, O lives with their Fiancé and 3 cats and enjoys playing video games in their free time. 

 

Kimya Imani Jackson is from Champaign, IL and Atlanta, GA.  This midwestern Georgia peach is a dancer, performance artist, Pochinko clown, choreographer, and a PhD trained Biobehavioral Health scientist. She has a B.A. in Psychology from Spelman College and Ph.D. in Biobehavioral Health from The Pennsylvania State University.  When not creating or thinking about creating, she is evaluating medical/allied health professionals.  

 

Julius Masri is a Philadelphia based multi-instrumentalist, performer and composer for the city’s dance community at large. His music focuses on improvisatory methods and syncretic/ linguistic/ somatic exchanges within various musical languages including Jazz, Metal, AfroCuban, Experimental Noise, and Arabic music. Born in Tripoli, Lebanon, he moved to the States in 1990 and began studying with Philadelphia instructors Carl Mottola, Elaine Hoffman-Watts, and as an undergraduate at Bard College, with AACM’s Thurman Barker, Richard Teitelbaum, and Joan Tower. Julius plays drums, circuit modified Casio keyboards, Oud, Kamancheh (aka Rabab, Spike Fiddle), and various other instruments. In November 2021, Julius released the album “The Arabic Room” under the project name Mephisto Halabi, garnering international praise in music publications and websites including WIRE Magazine (Dec2021), PopMatters, Radio al-Harra, Foxy Digitalis, and many others.

 

Connor Przybyszewski is a trombonist living in West Philly. A performer of numerous styles and genres, his main artistic focus is the investigation of new methods for group improvisation. He cites Fred Wesley and Paul Rutherford as his two key influences on the trombone. Connor has worked with and under brilliant artists such as Leah Stein, Marshall Allen, and Daniel Fishkin, and is a proud long-time member of the improvised music ensemble Space Whale Orchestra.

 

Andy Thierauf is a Philadelphia based percussionist who specializes in the creation and performance of contemporary music. He is particularly interested in combining percussion with theater, dance, and technology.  Andy teaches at Settlement Music School and is an adjunct professor of percussion at Kutztown University. https://www.andythierauf.com

 

Loren Groenendaal (they/them) is a dance and visual artist, choreographer, educator, and curator. They hold a BA in Dance and Visual Arts from Oberlin College, an MFA in Dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and is a Certified Movement Analyst (CMA) in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and Bartenieff Fundamentals (BF), which they earned from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS).

 

Loren was born in rural central Pennsylvania and nurtured on a forested mountain on the ancestral homeland of the Susquehannock. In addition to the rich and creative dance training, their childhood in this natural environment and her belief that humans are part of nature, informs her aesthetic. In 2003, Loren settled in Philadelphia on ancestral land of the Lenape. Over the years, they found and built a large network of creative people with whom they collaborate. Although trained in many visual arts practices, Loren’s professional art focuses on dance, movement, and performance with a special eye to the visual impact balanced with the kinesthetic experience. Most of their creative work is under the moniker, Vervet Dance. They are particularly skilled at directing large ensembles of music and dance improvisers, designing sculptural costumes, creating nature inspired dances, and site-specific performance. 

 

Much of Loren’s work often investigates the community-building possibilities of live art, the spectrums between improvisation and composition and ritual and performance. They have a pattern of making dance about the patterns in nature. They are a proponent of curiosity, complexity, adaptability, empathy, and freedom. Much of her work is "semi-composed," meaning she designs some elements and encourages freedom of expression by her collaborators. Occasionally making solos and duets, much of Loren’s work is site-responsive dance, inside or outside, inspired by nature, and with a large creative multi-media ensemble. When movement is choreographed, she draws from her experience with modern, postmodern, contemporary, release, Balinese, folk, social, breakdance, and contact improvisation for movement material and aesthetic inspiration. 

 

As a teacher, they have taught all ages, focusing on Creative Movement for children and Compositional Improvisation, Contact Improvisation, and Contemporary Modern Dance for teens and adults. They are currently teach improvisation to Dance and Theatre majors at Muhlenberg College and creative dance and visual arts to children with Koresh Kids Dance and the University City Arts League

 

Loren is a founding member, current resident artist, and board member of Mascher Space Cooperative. She is a (co)founding member, curator, and teacher for many ventures that support professionals and novices in the art of improvisation through movement and sound in performance or practice, including The H-O-T Series, The Impermanent Society of Philadelphia, Dissolving Doors, and Philadelphia Compositional Improvisation lab, Philadelphia Contact Improvisation in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia Underscore.

 

Groenendaal's creative work has been performed from Canada to Mexico and many places in between including Baja, DC, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia and presented by various organizations including the Abington Art Center, Bowerbird, the Cannery, the Community Education Center (CEC), Fringe Arts, Green Space, High Zero Foundation, Mascher Space Cooperative, Movement Research, North Carolina Dance Alliance, the Quarry, Studio 34, and Triskelion and in festivals and shows of Cultivate, Frantasia, Fresh Juice, Green Space Blooms, Inhale, New Edge Mix, and Philly Fringe Festival. Some of her works include "Boing!" "colorFULL," "In the Light," "Ornamentation," "Surrender and Support," and "SWARM!"

 

Groenendaal has received rewards, grants, artist residencies from the Abington Art Center, Bates Dance Festival, Community Education Center (CEC), DanceUSA Philadelphia, Mascher Space Cooperative, Penn Treaty Special Services District, SITES, and University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

 

In the Philadelphia area, Loren has danced with Jenny Roe Sawyer's From the Earth Dance Project, Graffito Works, Katherine Kiefer Stark's The Naked Stark, Lacy James' Mereminne Dancers, Melisa Putz Clark's pima group, Megan Bridge's <fidget>, Asimina Chremos, Curt Haworth, Leah Stein Dance Company, Swarthmore College's Balinese Gamelan Semara Santi, and the Indonesian Cultural Club of the Delaware/Philadelphia area. Beyond Philadelphia, they danced in the Modern/Contemporary choreography and structured improvisations of Ann Cooper Albright, Mark Dendy, Ann Dils, John Gamble, Jen Guy, Nusha Martynuk, Helen Simoneau, Augusto Soleodade, and Jan van Dyke.

 

As an artist, educator, and person, they are most interested in creating structures that allow for freedom or highlighting something special about life, site, or humanity that may be oft forgotten or taken for granted. She desires more connection and adaptation between people and builds opportunities for people to collaborate and create. They believe the universe is dancing and we are dancing with the universe.