Garth Fagan, Martha Myers and More kick Off Week 8 of the American Dance Guild Virtual Festival

MARTHA MYERS

American Dance Festival Dean Emeritus MARTHA MYERS has been a teacher, dancer, choreographer, film producer, newscaster, television personality, and writer. She served as the Director of Women's News for WBNS-TV in Columbus, Ohio. She received her MS from Smith College where she continued as Assistant Professor for 10+ years during the 50's within the Physical Education Department. In the early 60's her vision to match two growing time arts, modern dance and television, resulted in a series of nine programs called A Time To Dance, a precursor to Dance in America, for which she was writer, narrator, and co-producer with Jac Venza of WGBH/Boston. The programs in ballet, modern and ethnic dance were organized around such topics as Invention in Dance, Dance: A Reflection of Our Times, and Great Performances in Dance. These interviews with choreographers and dancers such as Anthony Tudor, Jose Limon, Herb Ross, Geoffrey Holder, John Butler, Nora Kaye, Maria Tallchief, Alwin Nikolais, Daniel Nagrin, Ximenez-Vargas Ballet Espanol and others were used extensively for dance courses in colleges and universities. Ms. Myers joined the dance faculty at Connecticut College in 1967, founded its dance department in 1971, and led the department until 1992 establishing both BA and MFA degrees, and was named Henry B. Plant Professor Emeritus. One of her first important moves at Connecticut (which was then a women's college) was to gather men from Wesleyan University to join the CC female students in her ground-breaking initiative The Experimental Movement Lab, which focused on improvisation and the idea of "play" through movement.

THUNDERBIRD AMERICAN INDIAN DANCERS

YA-OH-WAY (Premiere)

(A Hopi word which means good or fine.)

Louis Mofsie is the Director of the Thunderbird American Dancers and is a member of the Hopi and Winnebago tribes. He received his Master of Arts at Hofstra University and taught art for 35 years at the Meadowbrook School in East Meadow, New York. In addition to serving as the Artist-in-Residence at South Hampton College from 1972 to 1974, he has also led many Native American organizations, including the American Indian Counseling Center and the Indian League of the Americas. He has been the curator of exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the County Historical Museum in Bonneville, NY. He was the guest artist at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis with the American Indian Art, Form and Tradition exhibit, as well as showing his own work at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Woodards Museum in Gallup, New Mexico and the Gallup Ceremonials, also in Gallup, New Mexico.