Estonian Choreographer Eve Mutso Makes US Debut at SFIAF Shares a Bill with LEVYdance and Alyce Finwall

SFIAF is pleased to announce that the former principle dancer with the Scottish National Ballet, Eve Mutso (who will dance her swansong as Blanche Dubois in that company's production of A Streetcar Named Desire at Cal Performances on May 10) will make her US choreographic debut at the Festival later the same month. Mutso will perform her solo work Unknown (2016) as part of a shared bill with local companies LEVYdance (artistic director Garance Marneur) and Alyce Finwall Dance Theater.

The three choreographers will each present a work that reflects on different aspects of the human condition. Mutso's Unkownexplores the theme of creativity, uncertainty and what the inescapable part that taking risk and accepting the possibility of failure has in life.

French choreographer Garance Marneur will present a new work titled Pull Me Closer that explores how the vibrations and pulses our bodies create can both pull us apart and draw us closer to each other in a public space. Acting as a sequence of solos, duets and trios, the piece will transform the bodies of the dancers into moving energies, abstracting movement to draw geometrical lines and shapes in space that reflect the dynamic of our social interactivity. Pull Me Closer is being created collaboratively with the LEVYDance Company members.

Alyce Finwall's signature dance making styles can be athletic, sensuous and often surreal. Her latest work, Almost Human addresses contemporary culture as well as the richness and turbulence of interior lives through exuberant movement and meticulously crafted choreography. Almost Human will be created in collaboration with dancers Cooper Neely, Isabel Rosenstock, Katie Meyers and Khala Brannigan.

Festival director, Andrew Wood said of the program, "These are three dynamic young women choreographers who, as they make new strides in their lives and careers, have all created work that comments in one aspect or another on the breadth of emotion and fragility of the human condition-that perhaps not coincidentally bears some relation to the phases of growth and change in their own current circumstances. The differences and commonalities of their respective professional situations are bound together by a women's critique of what it takes to establish oneself (and maintain ones values) while competing in the business of dance."

The artists will also participate in a panel discussion with respected dance writer Rita Felciano, where their respective approaches to growing their careers and businesses and careers is one of the subjects of focus. The panel discussion will take place in the Cowell Theater lobby at 6:30pm on Saturday May 27.

Artist Biographies

Eve Mutso, born in Tallinn, Estonia, is a freelance dancer & choreographer and former Principal Dancer of Scottish Ballet, Scotland's national Dance Company, where she danced from 2003 to 2016. Eve has choreographed and performed as part of Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme in the past three years, presenting elEven in 2014, Ink of Innocence (featuring dancers from Scottish Ballet) in 2015 and Unknown in 2016. She has also choreographed and danced in a short balletic film Death as a New Beginning (Composer and Director Leighton Jones) in 2013. She was nominated in the United Kingdom for the Critics Circle National Dance Awards in 2015, 2013 and 2005.

Alyce Finwall has been making dances since 1994, developing a uniquely creative and theatrical style, noted for having an "impressive and accomplished choreographic symphony" by the SF Examiner and a "fierce fluidity in performance and a brooding surrealism in the choreography" by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She started AFDT in 1999 and has produced over forty original works in this seventeen-year history and has also had the great pleasure of collaborating with many diverse artists on works for both stage and film. Alyce experiments with process to create works that address the psychological and surreal states of contemporary culture as well as the richness and turbulence of our interior lives. In 2016 Alyce founded and became the director of the Moving Arts Studio in San Francisco.

Garance Marneur, LEVYdance's first Executive Artistic Director, has directed, designed and curated over 60 productions in the U.K. and internationally for theatre, dance, opera, and film, including works for Trafalgar Studios in London, National Theatre in London, Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Royal Shakespeare Company, Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Exploratorium, and NBC Universal. Marneur won the Linbury Biennial Prize for Stage Design in 2007, and was nominated for Best Scenic Design at the Broadway World UK Awards in 2014. She relocated to the United States to take over the reins of LEVYdance in 2015.

About Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture
Decommissioned by the U.S. Army in 1962 and converted from a military installation into a nonprofit cultural center and national park site in 1977, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture has long been host to a lively mix of arts, educational and cultural programming on San Francisco's northern waterfront. Each year, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture provides over $2 million in support to local arts organizations, enabling groups to produce diverse and innovative art works at the historic waterfront campus. With a nearly four-decade history as an arts and culture destination, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture is now focused on reinvigorating its programming and amenities to better serve and engage the evolving and dynamic Bay Area creative community. Central to this new vision is the commissioning and presentation of adventurous and unconventional art works best realized in nontraditional or historic settings.

In addition to strengthening its artistic programming, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture has recently completed a $21 million renovation of Pier 2. Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture is also currently working with the San Francisco Art Institute to move its graduate program to the pier, which will open in June 2017.

Funders
The 2017 San Francisco International Arts Festival is supported in part by: National Endowment for the Arts, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Koret Foundation, French American Cultural Exchange Foundation, Western Arts Federation, China International Culture Association, Korea Arts Management Services, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Prohelvetia-the Swiss Arts Council, Ministry of Culture of Taiwan and the Bernard Osher Foundation.

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