April 10, 2026
7:30 PM
LITERALLY
Choreographer:
Ashley Koclanis
Music:
Walk The Dog by Laurie Anderson
Performer:
Ashley Koclanis
This piece is an experiment in musicality and choreographing literally. It is an exploration of the abstract and the unexpected in the contemporary modern dance world. This work hopes to surprise and entertain the audience while also potentially weirding them out a little bit. In correlation with the theme ORBIT, this piece incorporates aspects of distortion and warped perceptions as if in a simulation.
Ashley Koclanis is a senior BFA Dance Performance student at Arizona State University. Originally from Southern California, she trained at Laguna Dance Theatre under Shery Gilbert. At ASU, she has performed, choreographed, and designed lighting for concerts and showcases, including Spring Dance Fest, Untangled Roots, and the Breaking Ground Festival. Her work explores musicality, emotion, and human connection in a contemporary style. She has also served as a guest artist over the past few years at Laguna Dance Theatre, specializing in teaching improvisational techniques. Ashley’s choreography works with personal stories in hopes of allowing others to feel seen and connected.
The Good Fall
Choreographer:
Nicole L Olson
Music:
Stabat Mater, RV 621 #4, Vivaldi
Performer:
Nicole L Olson
"Understanding weight doesn't keep glass from breaking" - Aura
Orbits occur when an object's forward momentum is perfectly balanced with the pull of gravity from another. It creates trajectory and domain. When what we believe is simply falling down, might it be that we are actually fulfilling our revolution?
Nicole L Olson, the artistic director of NicoleOlson|MovementChaos, is a choreographer and performance artist based out of Phoenix, AZ. Her work is inspired by the human experience; what we encounter, see, hear, breathe, live, and learn. It is rooted in expression through movement and connection. She communicates through broad, athletic, organic, and subtle movements to create a moment in time of the human condition. Using a wide range of emotions, Nicole tells stories that are ambitious, poignant, relatable, and powerful.
Down The Gates
Choreographer:
John Paul Bruno Alejandro
Music:
Night Of The Thumpasorus Peoples by Parliament
Performers:
John Paul Bruno Alejandro and Cherish Hayes
Down the Gates responds to the concert theme by treating Joy as a center of mass that the body continually returns to. This center is not fixed. It shifts, gets displaced, and must be actively realigned. The body stays in motion, circling, adjusting, and recalibrating in response.
JP Alejandro is a Filipinx American dance artist, educator, and community-engaged practitioner based in Phoenix, Arizona. His work explores memory, identity, and the body as a site of storytelling, drawing from personal and collective histories. He has performed with artists including Li Chiao-Ping, Raissa Simpson, Gerald Casel, and Michael Foley. Alejandro integrates performance, pedagogy, and wellness, collaborating with communities such as senior populations to expand access to movement. He holds an MFA in Dance from Arizona State University. Through choreography and teaching, he cultivates spaces for connection, critical reflection, and embodied expression. His practice centers care, memory, and intergenerational dialogue.
eye roll
Choreographer:
Aliah Teclaw
Music:
Nychthemera in A Major by Time Binding Ensemble
Performer:
Aliah Teclaw
“eye roll” explores the gravitational pull of grief on the body, mind, and spirit. Through continuous circular motion inspired by centripetal force, the solo reveals grief’s weight, its repetition, and the strength required to endure its cycle.
Aliah Teclaw is a choreographer, dancer, actress, and singer from Joliet, Illinois. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During her time in school, she has worked with acclaimed dance artists such as Tere O’Connor, Jacob Henns, Paige Cunningham-Caldarella, and Ty Lewis. Aliah has danced and collaborated with companies including Visceral Dance Chicago, CaZo Dance Theatre, and Kyn3ct. Outside of performing, Aliah is a dance and movement educator, where she teaches at CaZo Dance Center, Pure Barre Tempe, and Pure Barre Ahwatukee.
Iwosama
Choreographers:
Sherry Mulholland, Bethanne Rose, and Cynthia Wasco
Music:
Eerie Sounds - Dark Ambiences - Scary Sound Effects - Dark Cinematic Sample Library and Lisbon by Jerskin Fendrix
Sound edited by MK Ford
Performers:
Funhouse movement theater: Sherry Mulholland, Bethanne Rose, and Cynthia Wasco
Iwosama is a contemporary avant-garde Butoh piece inspired by the tiny orbits within ourselves, synchronizing and colliding with the outer orbits that connect us to our world and the universe. This piece compels both performers and spectators to investigate stillness, collapse, and potential.
Sherry Mulholland is the artistic director and dancer with Funhouse. She studied dance at the University of Arizona, has performed in The Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Co. and dances with multiple local companies.
Bethanne Rose is a contemporary dancer and choreographer who has performed and created works with companies such as ZUZI! Dance and Funhouse.
Cynthia Wasco has been dancing for over 35 years and teaches modern, musical theater, and is the Company Director for Breakout Studios’ Life Moves Dance Company. She also performs with Funhouse and Zuzi.
Meditative Metamorphosis
Choreographer:
Feather Weldon
Music:
Doors by Keaton Eckhoff
Performer:
Feather Weldon
Through cycles of embodied prayer, the dancer moves in a circular and repetitive meditative movement process. Through this repetition and cycling of the soul, they overcome obstacles and find closeness to God and self assurance.
Feather Weldon is a professional dancer, choreographer, and dance educator working towards an MFA in Dance at University of Arizona (2026). She holds a BA in Dance from The University of Akron and has performed with Dayton Ballet, Verb Ballets, Charlottesville Ballet, Zion Dance Project, American Neoclassical Ballet, Ad Deum Dance Company, Ballet Legato, and MadJax Dance Company. She has choreographed for various studios around the country and her recent work, Risk and Release, won second place in the 2025 Rocky Mountain Choreography festival and was selected for the 2025 Dance City Festival Detroit. Come see her thesis in May!
.micro[LOOP]
Choreographer:
Vo Vera
Music:
Anohni - In My Dreams ; Eastghost - Out My Hands
Performer:
Vo Vera
Habit: a dominant or regular disposition or tendency; prevailing character or quality. Repetition hidden in stillness. Predictable futures will lead you right back here. What habit dragged you back in? Why is acceleration on replay? How do you stop the momentum?
Vo Vera is a multidisciplinary artist and educator with over two decades of practice as a self-trained street dancer and movement instructor. Originally a Bboy, he thrives on creating work that explores movement language synthesis and intentionality. Vo Vera has served as faculty at Arizona State University, Maricopa Community Colleges, Santa Ana College and Cerritos College. In between courses, he works on solo projects, as well as with Jacob Jonas The Company and his street arts collective The Sacred G’s. FB/IG: @vospacevera
she's in love with the janitor
Choreographer:
Carley Conder
Music:
“Moonlight Serenade” by Glenn Miller
Performer:
Tabitha Burton
“she’s in love with the janitor” draws inspiration from Rumi’s poem "The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty", drifting between presence and absence. The work explores a fractured interior—two states of being unfolding at once. Suspended between memory and immediacy, the dancer slips between longing and detachment, held in the weight of a single moment.
Carley Conder is the Artistic Director of CONDER|dance, founded in Arizona in 2003. She creates, teaches, produces, and performs both locally and nationally. Her work has been presented at major Arizona venues including the Herberger Theater, Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, Mesa Arts Center, Phoenix Art Museum, and Tempe Center for the Arts. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Dance at Arizona State University and maintains ongoing partnerships with Tempe Center for the Arts, developing original productions and community programming. Conder also produces Breaking Ground and Tiny Dances, festivals that support artists through presentation and exchange. Her work has been shown nationally at Dixon Place, WestFest at Martha Graham Studios, and Wave Rising in Brooklyn. A former member of Keith Johnson/Dancers, she has received numerous grants and was named one of Phoenix New Times’ “100 Creatives.”
Бесконечные алые розы (Endless scarlet roses)
Choreographer:
Leah M. Friedman
Music:
Миллион алых роз (A Million Scarlet Roses) by Alla Pugacheva
Performer:
Leah M. Friedman
This solo, Endless Scarlet Roses (working title), pokes at the uncomfortable feelings of jealousy that rise in us when people around us seem to be doing better than us, accomplishing more, receiving more. It pokes at the cyclical nature of envy: how easy it is to be knocked out of our personal orbit by envy and also how easy it is to remain locked in a cycle of comparison. The piece itself is orbital, or cyclical, in its structure, leaving room for the audience's interpretation of how orbits and cycles appear.
Leah M. Friedman is a dance artist and researcher based in Phoenix, AZ. Originally from Philadelphia, PA, Leah has performed and toured with Philadanco!, #dbdanceproject, and Waheedworks in Philadelphia as well as CONDER/dance and Methods of Madness Dance Theatre in Arizona. Her choreography explores relationships using props and comedic elements. She has presented work at the Tempe Center for Arts (2026), Phoenix Art Museum (2023, 2024), The Herberger Theater in Phoenix (2024), and Philly FringeArts (2021) where her collaborative online work was awarded as an audience favorite. Leah is also a PhD student at ASU studying how grassroots organizers create mechanisms for bodily autonomy in today’s landscape of digital surveillance.
You Favor a Girl That I Knew
Choreographer:
Charlotte Adams in collaboration with the performers
Music:
"Danced All Night" performed by The Tiger Lillies
Performers:
Amie Marino and Allyson Yoder
Adams' new work follows two aging beauties resisting the downward pull of gravity and the indignity of fading glory. In old prom dresses, they reveal figures that are at once comic, sad, and deeply human as their orbit becomes a negotiation with time, memory, and the body itself.
Charlotte Adams & Dancers premiered at NY’s Joyce SoHo in 2001 and again in 2003 & 2006. Highlights include performances at Highways Performance Space (LA), Triskelion Arts (NYC), UNL (Lincoln, NE), El Museo Centro Leon (Santiago, DR), New Territory/Cuerpo de Danza (San Juan, PR), and Theatres Iseion and Odyssud Blagnac in France. Adams performed in “Dancing on the Ceiling: solos performed by women of a certain age” 2017-2024. She earned an MFA at the University of AZ (1995), retired Professor Emeritus of Dance from the University of Iowa (2019), and now lives and works in Tucson creating new dances, four to be presented by Zuzi Dance, June 5 & 6.
Special Thanks:
Tempe Center for the Arts
Artistic and Creative Director: Carley Conder
Technical Director: Davey Trujillo
Tech Crew: Matt Hannen, Ashley Koclanis, Keira Leigh Nichols
Darby Rikhoff, and Cami Tenorio
Photography - Rick Meineke
Videography - MK Ford