Alex Ketley

Alex Ketley

Alex trained as a dancer at the Washington Ballet, the School of American Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. In 1994 he moved to California to join the San Francisco Ballet where he performed a wide range of classical and contemporary repertory. In 1998 he co-created The Foundry with Chris Burns in order to explore his deepening interests in choreography, improvisation, mixed media work, and collaborative process.

With The Foundry he has been an artist-in-residence at many of the country’s leading art institutions and the company has received extensive support and recognition for its various projects. As an independent artist, he has created new work for companies and universities throughout the United States and has received acknowledgement for this work through the National Choo-San Goh Award, the Inaugural Princess Grace Award for Choreography, the BNC National Choreographic Competition, two Chime Fellowships, two Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Fellowship, as well as awards from the Hubbard Street 2 National Choreographic Competition and the International Choreographic Competition of the Festival Des Arts de Saint-Saveaur.

In 2003, he helped create the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, an organization in which he still serves as an advisor, teacher and the resident choreographer. In 2008, his work To Color Me Different won an Isadora Duncan Award for Best Ensemble Performance and was considered one of the top ten performances of the year by both "Voice of Dance" and the "San Francisco Chronicle". In addition to a number of new commissions, in 2009 he was awarded a prestigious Gerbode-Hewlett Choreographer Commissioning Award to create the new piece Please Love Me, which premiered with The Foundry in May of 2010 and is being performed throughout the year in California.

Media Fellowship Project | Fall 2012

No Hero

Returning Choreographic Fellow Alex Ketley continues his development of No Hero, a study on our country and all its tremendous diversity, beauty, confusion and stratification economically and socially.

Feeling he could no longer only create dance in the hidden confines of the dance studio, Ketley and company members of The Foundry traveled extensively throughout the rural west, sharing dance with strangers and trying to find out what dance means to the lives of people in small towns throughout the county. While making work in shopping malls, mountains, hotel lobbies, small diners, abandoned buildings and rural towns, Ketley documented his encounters, recording the thoughts, observations of many along the way. In July, 2012, he presented the material at Z Space @ Theater Artaud in San Francisco. Rita Felciana wrote in the SF Bay Guardian “Hero is piece of pure Americana, a tender and amusing tribute to ordinary people and the role that dance may or may not play in their lives.”

This fall Ketley will return to the original sites to share his research, documentation and performative work with those he encountered and begin mapping the next phase of the project.

This Media Fellowship Project is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Choreographic Fellow | August 9 – 25, 2009

Theater-Irrelevant Project

Ketley explored the idea of creating a single mixed-media work that challenged the Foundry’s notions of site-specificity. He aimed to create a new piece that would be modular by design and free from the confines of a formal theater space. While in residence, he worked on distilling movement vocabulary deliberately chosen for its effectiveness in a diversity of situations, venues and cultural contexts. The two primary focuses of this residency were the development of movement in the studio, and testing the effectiveness of the work in different locations throughout the city.

Collaborators in Residence: Les Stuck [digital-media artist], Christian Burns, Andrea Flores and Claire Granier [dancers]. Slideshow photos by Kathryn Noletto Felis.