CLAUDIA LAVISTA & DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC
MELLON FELLOWSHIP 2011-12
Choreographer Claudia Lavista will collaborate with Martha Feldman, Shulamit Ran, Augusta Read Thomas, the Composition Ph.D. program, and others to develop a new site-specific work around themes of invisibility and aging.
Claudia is a dancer, choreographer and teacher. She started her studies of music and theater at the age of eight. She subsequently studied dance at the National System for Professional Teaching of Dance in Mexico City. In 1987 she joined the dance company U,X. Onodanza and was later asked to join Danzahoy Dance Company from Venezuela, where she danced for five years and began her first choreographic work. In 1992 she founded Delfos Contemporary Dance with Victor Manuel.
Since the beginning of her career, she has received numerous awards for her artistic works including the National Dance Award in 1992, Best Female Dancer at the International Dance Festival of San Luis Potosi in 2005, and Best Female Dancer at the National Dance Award in 1998 and the 2002. She has also been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts with the fellowships Experience Interpreter (2005-06), Young Creator (2002-03), VII Special Projects Concourse (1996), and Interpreter (1994). Through the State Arts and Culture Found she won fellowships for “Recognize Artist” in 2001 and Scenic Production Award in 2006. In 2001 the specialized critics selected her as “One of the 10 Best Dancers of the XX Century” and in 2007 the press named her as the Best Interpreter and Best Choreographic Work of the International Dance Festival “A Desert for Dance” in Sonora.
In 2007 she was invited as International Visiting Artist at the 25th Bates Dance Festival, which is supported in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA). Her work “Stone Garden”, created for the North American dancer Andree Scott, received the Award of the Austin Critics Table as “Outstanding Dance Concert” in 2008. In 2008, The National Endowment for the Arts recognized her artistic development by entering her in the Creators of Art National System.
Claudia has performed in more than 80 choreographies and has created more than 30 choreographic works. She has collaborated with theater and opera directors, photographers, video artists and numerous other artist professionals. Her choreography has been praised by critics in more than a dozen countries and has been presented by seven dance companies, among them the prestigious Mexican National Dance Company and Winnipeg Contemporary Dance.
Claudia is a dancer, co-artistic director and choreographer of Delfos Contemporary Dance and a co- director and teacher of the Mazatlan Professional School of Contemporary Dance (EPDM). She has taught classes and workshops in México and abroad. In October 2008 the International Dance Festival “Lila Lopez” in San Luis Potosi granted the EPDM the Raul Flores Canelo Award for its pedagogical and artistic contribution to the national dance media. More about Delfos...
Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College Chair, Department of Music; Ph.D., Music History and Theory, University of Pennsylvania, 1987
Martha Feldman is a cultural historian of European vernacular musics, ca. 1500-1900, with a concentration on Italy. Her projects have explored the senses and sensibilities of listeners, the interplay of myth, festivity, and kingship in the realm opera, cinema and media, and the figure of the musical artist, always with an eye toward social and political phenomena and artistic production. Her first monograph was City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995; winner of the Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference in conjunction with the Centre for Reformation Studies), which dealt with madrigals as part of the civic culture of Renaissance Venice. Feldman's Renaissance interests have extended to the music of Renaissance courtesans, with results published partly in conjunction with her graduate students in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited, Oxford, 2006; winner of the 2007 Ruth A. Solie Award of the AMS). In 2007, she published an extended book about 18th-century opera seria as manifestation and refraction of changing notions of sovereignty and festivity in the course of the later eighteenth century. That work, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy won the Gordon J. Laing Award of the University of Chicago Press for the faculty book "published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction." Read more...
Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Music; Artistic Director, Contempo (the Contemporary Chamber Players)
Shulamit Ran, a native of Israel, began setting Hebrew poetry to music at the age of seven. By nine she was studying composition and piano with some of Israel’s most noted musicians, including composers Alexander Boskovich and Paul Ben-Haim, and within a few years she was having her works performed by professional musicians and orchestras. As the recipient of scholarships from both the Mannes College of Music in New York and the America Israel Cultural Foundation, Ran continued her composition studies in the United States with Norman Dello-Joio. In 1973 she joined the faculty of University of Chicago, where she is now the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music. She lists her late colleague and friend Ralph Shapey, with whom she also studied in 1977, as an important mentor. Read more...
University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music and the College
August Read Thomas, born in 1964 in Glen Cove, New York, was the Mead Composer-in-Residence for Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1997 through 2006. In 2007, her ASTRAL CANTICLE was one of the two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. The "Colors of Love" CD by Chanticleer, which features two of Thomas' compositions, won a Grammy award.
Thomas is a member of: the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Advisory Committee of the Alice M. Ditson Fund; the Board of Trustees of the American Society for the Royal Academy of Music; the Eastman School of Music's National Council; as well as boards and advisory boards of several chamber music groups. She has been on the Board of Directors of the American Music Center (www.amc.net) since 2000. She was elected Chair of the Board of the American Music Center, a volunteer position that ran from 2005 to 2008. Read More...