Artistic Director and Collaborators

D. Chase Angier

Director, Choreographer, Teacher, Performer

While living between Brooklyn and Alfred New York, D. Chase Angier creates and performs dance-theater, performed installations, site-specific works and walking performances pieces. These intuitively driven works are created in collaboration with dynamic artists in the visual arts, performance, music and theater, and have been performed internationally and nationally in theaters, galleries, and inspiring sites.

In response to her visually inspired work, she also co-creates and co-performs visceral and highly physical dance duets with Robert Bingham in Angier/Bingham Dance. Regardless, their latest work, is a series of duets that operate within the temporal and spatial constraints of straight dance and music (no sets, props or other visuals) to illustrate a stormy and complicated relationship. Regardless, brings to life a rich emotional world of need, hope, desire, constraint, and sabotage, creating dances that evoke, but do not dictate, story and meaning.

Prior to her dual rural and urban living in up and downstate New York, since 1988 Angier has created dance-theater works, performed, and taught in New York City. In 1995, she founded Chase Dance Theater, a company comprised of dancers, actors, writers, musicians, and visual artists with whom she collaborated to create innovative works. Her CDT dances have been performed nationally and reviewed as “intelligent entertainment”, “a comic romp” and “fine storytelling” by the New York Times and The Dance Insider. Her signature work, “Lemons for Loveliness”, was included in The Dance Insider’s top fifty dance works. She still recreates these works for other dance companies. Angier also toured nationally as a performer with Senta Driver’s dance company Harry, and has danced with a variety of New York pick-up dance companies.

Angier is an Associate Professor and Director of the Dance Program at Alfred University since 2002. Her other university teaching experience includes being an Assistant Professor at Columbia College and Appalachian State University, and a guest artist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Appalachian State University, Kenyon College, Columbia College, University of South Florida, Meredith College, and the University of Rochester. She was a Teaching Artist with the Lincoln Center Institute and The Joyce Theater’s Aesthetic Education Programs, and a movement instructor at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. She is the co-founder along with Jennifer Salk of the Green Mountain Dance Teachers Retreat in Woodstock Vermont and received her MFA in choreography from The Ohio State University and her BA in dance from UCLA.

Click here for Angier Art CV.

Laurel Jay Carpenter

Laurel Jay Carpenter is a performance and installation artist, investigating longing, devotion and alchemy in her durational live works. From 1990-2002, while based in New York City, she exhibited at venues including Exit Art/The First World, The Knitting Factory, Performance Space 122, Judson Church House and Brooklyn’s Borough Hall.

Internationally, Laurel has presented work at the NMAC Foundation in southern Spain; with Wooloo Productions and the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin, Germany; as well as part  of the 2007 Venice Biennale.  Currently, Laurel is Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Alfred University in western New York.

For more information, please see: LaurelJay.com.

Robert Bingham

Robert Bingham is Visiting Artist in Residence in Dance at Alfred University. He received his M.F.A. in dance from SUNY Brockport, where he was a Pylyshenko-Strasser Award recipient. Prior to attending graduate school, Robert danced with several New York-based companies and artists including De Facto Dance, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Jennifer Monson. His own work was included in programs at various venues, including P.S.122 and The Painted Bride in Philadelphia. More recently he has danced in works by Kelly Donovan, dance scholar Sondra Fraleigh, and butoh-based choreographer Lani Weissbach, and he regularly collaborates with AU colleague D. Chase Angier, with whom he has performed frequently throughout the east coast and in Mexico as Angier/Bingham Dance. Robert is a featured dancer in the dance-on-film "Broken Images," which has been shown nationally.

Robert has had extensive training in somatic modalities, including certification to teach yoga (Integral Yoga Institute, 1996), and graduation from East-West Institute of Somatic Therapy (2003). His dance and yoga studies take him regularly to India, where he has also taught, choreographed and performed.

Tammy Renée Brackett

Tammy Renée Brackett is an Artist / Educator whose artwork often demonstrates the impossibility of finding any absolute structure governing identity or pinpointing its location. Using both new media and traditional mediums, she raises questions concerning the manipulations of science and mass media as they define human epistemology on both an individual and collective scale.

Brackett has a BA from Alfred University and an MFA in Electronic Integrated Art from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University. She has exhibited work in China, Japan, Croatia, Hungary, and the United States and was awarded the 2005 College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the NEA. She has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design at Alfred University and Director of the Loupe Gallery in Prattsburgh, NY.  Brackett is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Animation at Alfred State College, Alfred NY. http://www.whitedogrecords.com/TRB.htm

John Laprade - Composer/Film Maker

John Laprade has been working professionally in film/television and music as an editor, cameraman, composer and songwriter since 1990.  After earning an M.A. in film production from The American University in 1989, John moved to New York City and has edited documentary films, television shows and promotionals for National Geographic, Nike, MTV, VH1, Showtime, Sundance Channel, ABC sports, and many others.  He was the editor for the Emmy award winning MTV sports program during the 90's and was nominated for best editor in 1995 and was a Cable Ace winner that same year.

As a composer/songwriter John has written songs and created music and sound design for television and radio as well as dance and dance theater.  His music has been used in national commercials and films and he has worked extensively with D. Chase Angier creating several pieces for her company Chase Dance Theater and Angier Performance Works. As a songwriter/recording artist he has toured nationally and internationally, and made 3 full-length studio albums of original pop/rock/indie music with his former band Astro Chicken. Astro Chicken’s music was recently used in the feature film "labor pains" starring Lindsey Lohan and Cheryl Hines.  John is currently recording his first full-length solo album due in the fall of 2009.

Markéta Fantová

Markéta Fantová is a scenographer working for theatre, dance, physical theatre and performance art venues. She has worked in theaters, galleries and visually inspiring sites in the US as well as in Europe. Her costume and set designs were included in the USA Prague Quadrennial National Exhibit in 2007 and the World Stage Design Exhibit in Seoul, Korea in 2009. Markéta is native of Prague, Czech Republic. She received her BFA in Scenography from the Academy of Performing Arts – DAMU and her MFA in Set Design from Wayne State University in Detroit. She received an award for outstanding achievement as a teaching artist from The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2007. Her professional work includes set, costume and lighting designs for Physical Theatre 22 - Theatre On The Balustrade in Prague, UnderMain Theatre, Circle Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theatre and Water Tower Theatre all located in the Dallas-Forth Worth area. Besides her theatre design, Marketa collaborates with dynamic artists and choreographers such as D. Chase Angier and Mary Williford-Shade.