!!! DanceAbility !!!

Alito Alessi

Alito Alessi is the artistic director of Joint Forces Dance Co. (JFDC), and founder of DanceAbility. DanceAbility is a dancing method, that integrates people with and without disabilities.
Together they explore and invent movement and dance.
Alessi was given a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Choreographer's Fellowships by the American National Endowment for the Arts (1992-1993 and 1995-1996) and the Oregon Arts Commission (1991), and in the year of 1991, JFDC was given the "National Endowment for the Arts Exemplary Grant" for DanceAbility. Dancing students and other people with and without disabilities coming from 17 countries, joined the Teachers' Training for DanceAbility; many of them teaching it now in their own countries. Alessi was asked to create projects for the Chemeketa Community College, for Amstelrade in Holland, and Theatre M.A.R.I.A. in switzerland.

Alessi teaches Contact Improvisation, Bodywork, and DanceAbility Workshops, and he performs together with JFDC in North- und South-America and in Europe, for instance, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, D.C. U.S.A.), at the International VSA Arts Festival, at Dance Umbrella in Boston, Jacob's Pillow (U.S.A.), at the Vienna International Dance Festival, at the International Festival of New Dance in Brasil, at the Berner Tanz Tage", at the Festival of Freaks, and at the Contact Arte (Italy).
He held workshops at the Mexican Academy of Dance, at the New Mexico School of the Deaf, at the New Dance Lab of Minneapolis, and at the New Territories Performance Festival in Scotland.

Since 1982, Alessi organizes the yearly "Breitenbush Contact Improvisation Conference and Jam", which is an international happening. There are two documentations of his work, one of them, "Common Ground", is a video of a DanceAbility-Workshop, and it won the "silver apple" at the National Educational Film & Video Festival in 1991.

In 2005, he was granted the "Guggenheim Fellowship".

Alessi studied social work at the University of Oregon, and he was trained in martial arts for several years. Bevor he started dancing, he was a masseur.
Alessi worked with Andrew Harwood, Nancy Stark Smith, and Karen Nelson. At the moment, he is working on his own book about DanceAbility.

For more information, see: www.danceability.com

last update: 28.04.2010