TaniaIsaacDance exists as a laboratory for creating highly physical, poetic, contemporary movement narratives that drive social and artistic discourse. In addition to creating collaboratively across artistic disciplines, we propose to create forums and ancillary projects that precipitate and advocate for intellectual curiosity and civic engagement.
Keeping at the center the absolutely addictive sensation of moving with both meditation and abandon, we aim to distill the satisfaction that we crave from freedom to move in any form/idiom/culture/location and marry it with the conscious ideas of how dance/movement/art/thought shapes who we are; where we exist/live and how we negotiate that interaction.
Tania Isaac fuses choreography with personal documentary and social commentary and grapples with identity, feminism and juxtapositions of cultural influences, resulting in dances that are elegant and dramatic, yet highly accessible. An electric and commanding performer, Isaac has been a member of David Dorfman Dance, Rennie Harris Puremovement and Urban Bushwomen. She has penned an article in Susanna Sloat’s anthology “Making Caribbean Dance”(University Press of Florida) and is in the process of revising “Fluid Performance Dynamics” an investigation of movement and performance language generated at the intersection of Dance, Linguistics & Physics (Hawaii International Conference of Arts and Humanities, 2005).
Her current work is a potentially groundbreaking exploration of creative method she calls the “Open Notebook” – a way of turning a room into a laboratory of investigation and participation in multiple forms. She developed this project during residencies at the Maggie Allesse National Center for Choreography (2006,2009). “I fell in love with the idea that moving could be intellectual practice in itself” says Isaac “I enjoy the messy and exhausting process of bringing things to life”
She is a 2011 Pew Fellow and a 2012 MacDowell Fellow.
(tid) open-notebook 