A self-described kinesiophile and lover of
information; physical and verbal; Tania Isaac was born in Castries, St. Lucia
and although intended by educational design to enter a traditional science
based field; discovered along the way a love of movement, a love of questions,
a love of challenge and a desire to find a different way to be an active part
of the social fabric. Since then, she has spent her career working towards a
model of performance and conversation that seeks to span and deepen her interest
in esthetic, cultural and academic practices. Honored as one of Dance
Magazine’s “25 to watch” (2006) Tania Isaac has been faculty at Bates College
Dance Festival, Resident Artist at Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia,
and a US/JAPAN Exchange Artist through Philadelphia Dance Projects, Dance
Theater Workshop and the Japan Foundation. She has received grants form the
Independence Foundation, Dance Advance (a program of the Pew Charitable
Trusts), The National Performance Network, the Leeway foundation, Harlemstage
(formerly Aaron Davis Hall) Fund for New Work. She is the recipient of the 2008
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship Award.
Ms. Isaac is a former Associate Artist at the
Atlantic Center for the Arts and a former member of Rennie Harris Puremovement,
Urban Bush Women, and Li Chiao-Ping Dance. In 2006, she was a Choreographic Fellow
at MANCC, creating a template for a new working process ‘open notebook’. In
partnership with Francisca Plummer of Saidi Consulting (St. Lucia), Tania is
also the co-founder of Imprint: Dialogues of a generation, a social action
program geared towards developing conversations between youth and civic
leaders. She conducts presentations as a Commonwealth Speaker with the
Pennsylvania Humanities Council (PHC); presents workshops and classes; creates
new work and tours internationally. Isaac has worked closely with WHYY TV and
the PHC to create a segment of Humanities Live! a TV special featuring her
approach to presenting Caribbean Social Dance in Historical Context. She has
been adjunct faculty at Bryn Mawr College and has taught and performed in
extended residencies at Bennington College (VT) and UW –Madison (WI), Virginia
Commonwealth University (VA) and The Ohio State University among others. Helen, Heaven & I, a personal essay tracing the history and evolutions of
Social dance forms in St. Lucia and their impact on her choreographic work,
will be featured in an upcoming anthology of Dance writings. In addition,
with Fluid Performance Dynamics: Caribbean Movement Esthetics in a
Post-Modern Frame presented in 2008 at the International Conference of Arts
and Humanities, she begins her research into creating direct links between
movement, physics and linguistics.
Tania is a graduate with honors from the University
of Wisconsin - Madison and received her MFA from Temple University where she
served as graduate assistant and University Fellow.
Maggie Allesee
