Instructors
NANCY STARK SMITH first trained as an athlete and gymnast, leading her to modern and postmodern dance in the early 1970s, greatly influenced by the Judson Church Dance Theater breakthroughs of the 1960s in NYC. She danced in the first performances of contact improvisation in 1972 and has since been central in its development as dancer, performer, teacher, organizer, and writer/publisher. She travels throughout the world teaching and performing contact and other dance improvisation work, collaborating with many favorite partners and performance-makers over the years including Steve Paxton, Julyen Hamilton, Karen Nelson, Andrew Harwood, and most recently, musician Mike Vargas. In 1975 she cofounded Contact Quarterly, an international journal of dance and improvisation, which she continues to coedit and produce. She lives in western Massachusetts, USA.
MIKE VARGAS began playing music in 1959. His curiosity and love of collaboration have led him through many contexts and cultures, from cocktail lounges in Indonesia to New York’s Lower East Side, from cancer wards to the Kennedy Center. Since 1980 he has been composing, performing nationally and internationally, teaching music and improvisation, creating well over 100 commissioned dance scores, and presenting his music in concert and on CDs. He has taught at universities across the USA and has participated regularly at numerous festival such as the Bates Dance Festival and Tanzsommer Innsbruck. For the last 7 years he has been teaching and performing with Nancy Stark Smith.
Since 1976, NINA MARTIN has been a dedicated force in the development of postmodern dance as a performer, choreographer, organization builder, and teacher. For nearly twenty years she worked in New York City as a professional dance artist and major activist in the downtown dance community. Since 1995, Martin serves as a pioneer, bringing postmodern dance and community philosophy to southern California.
As a performer, Martin toured nationally as a member of David Gordon's Pick Up Company and performed and assisted in the development of Martha Clarke’s Miracolo D’More. She was a member of the New York based Channel Z, a performance collective, that she co-founded with Stephen Petronio, Randy Warshaw, Diane Madden, Paul Langland, Danny Lepkoff, and Robin Feld. Cynthia Novack highlights Martin’s role in Channel Z in Sharing the Dance, a comprehensive study on Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Martin also danced with Steve Paxton in "Beyond the Mainstream," a production of the PBS Dance in America series.
As a choreographer, Martin founded Nina Martin/Performance, which she directed from 1979-1994. Martin’s work has been produced in New York City at PS 122, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace, Creative Time, Movement Research, and La Mama ETC. Her work has been produced in Seattle, Austin, San Antonio, and Cleveland, Helsinki, Holland, Ireland, Austria, Italy, Venezuela and Russia. Nina Martin/Performance received support from the National Endowment for the Arts (1985, 1987, 1988, 1989), the Jerome Foundation (1985), the New York State Council on the Arts (1988, 1990), Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation (1989, 1990) and “Meet the Composer” (1991).
As an organization builder, Martin served as a board member for Movement Research, a major producer and educational resource for new innovations in dance. Martin co-founded the New York Dance Intensive, a unique full-time postmodern performance training program. In 1992, Martin gathered a network of professional dancers to form Locktime Performance where she began her developing her unique dance investigations called Rewire/States Work and Ensemble Thinking. After moving to San Diego, Martin spearheaded Lower Left as a teaching and performance collective. Martin has annually created work with Lower Left as well as commissioned work for regional professional dancers such as Tonnie Sammartano. In addition, Martin’s expertise in community building has been funneled into the co-development of ongoing education programs for and with the community.
As a teacher, Martin has secured a loyal following of students, through her classes in composition, Rewire/States Work, contact improvisation, Hamilton Floor Barre and other approaches to dancing. In addition to teaching through Lower Left, Martin has taught in New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing, University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at San Diego, San Diego State University, the School for the Development of New Dance in Amsterdam, Helsinki’s National School and Movement Research. She is also a featured teacher at many festivals including the Seattle Festival for Alternative Dance, Dance Weeks in Vienna, the International Summer School of Dance Tokyo and the International Festival of Movement Dance in Yaroslavl, Russia.