Originally from the Hudson Valley New York, Leah Stein had been living and making dances in Philadelphia for the past 15 years. A sensitive and unique performer her work has been performed nationally in galleries, theaters, museums, outdoor sites, and dance festivals across the country. She has performed and taught in Java, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Romania, and Scotland. She has been awarded grants from Dance Advance, the Leeway Foundation, the PA Council on the Arts including three Fellowships in Choreography, among others. She was a 1999 finalist for the PEW Fellowships in the Arts. She has been in residence at Yellow Springs Art Institute, the American Dance Festival, The Winter Pillow, and Djerassi Resident Artist Program in California where she received an honorary award for her work "Barn Dance". In 2001, Stein was awarded a Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland for "In Situ" created for the extraordinary DanceBase building in Edinburg. Stein has collaborated with dancer/choreographers Sean Feldman, and Gus Solomons Jr, sculptors Jeanne Jaffe and Ed Dormer, poet Josie Foo, and composers/musicians Robert Maggio, Mark Weber, David Forlano and Dave Burrell. She has been collaborating with percussionist Toshi Makihara for over 15 years. She currently teaches at Susan Hess Studio, Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore Colleges. Leah Stein founded the Leah Stein Dance Company in 1998.

TOSHI MAKIHARA, MUSICIAN

Since the fall of 2000, Makihara has been focussing on two separate performing styles: 1. New Jazz performances on a conventional drum-set, and 2. the "One Drum + One Cymbal" setting for his experimental free improvised music programs.

Makihara's recordings include Grammy nominated "Another Shining Path" (1998 Drimala Records) in trio with Gary Hassay (alto saxophone) and William Parker (bass), and "Hurricane Floyd" (Spring 2000, Sublingual Records) in trio with Thurston Moore (guitar) and Wally Shoup (alto sax). www.toshimakihara.com

JOSIE SMITH is an independent choreographer and dancer based in Philadelphia. This May, she completed a year-long dance residency at the Community Education Center where she presented her first full evening of choreography. Josie was also a four-year participant in the Choreographers Project at the Susan Hess Studio where she produced over 15 works including improvisational pieces, collaborations with composers and works based on her own text. She has performed her solo works in New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, and in numerous venues in Philadelphia where her work has been produced at the Fringe Festival, the CEC, through involvement with Fieldwork, and at Last Monday at the Ethical Society among others. Josie was also a 1999 PCA fellow in the Emerging Choreographer category. Last year she was chosen to participate in the Bank: Philadelphia Project under the direction of Deb Saxon and Paul Old of the London based Siobhan Davies Dance Company. As a long-time member of the Leah Stein Dance Company, Josie has performed in all of Leah's local outdoor, site-specific works. She continues to investigate her relationship to choreography and improvisational dance forms through the creation of new works, and through the influence of Yoga, figure drawing and whitewater canoeing.

ROKO KAWAI is a Philadelphia-based independent dancer/choreographer who is currently investigating the relationship between the specificity of traditional dance and the craft ofimprovisation. In 2000, she returned toher earlier study of Japanese Classical Dance and has since focused her exploration on its physicality, musicality and theatricality as inspiration for post-modern improvisation and choreography. Recently, she has worked with the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange and "The Art of Rice" international tour through UCLA's Center for Intercultural Performance, which brought together traditional Asian performance genres with contemporary dance-making. Her work has been presented throughout Philadelphia; at Movement Research Exchange and Symphony Space in New York; Northwestern University in Chicago; at the Florida Dance Festival and Jacob's Pillow Inside/Out; and in New Zealand. Formerly trained as a visual artist, Roko has often collaborated with artists from other disciplines including musicians David Forlano (found object, recorded/live soundscore), Lenny Seidman/Splinter Group (world percussion), and Reggie Workman and Oliver Lake (jazz); and theater designers Helen Todd (light) and Hiroshi Iwasaki (stage installation). Roko has been supported by the Artists Exploration Fund of Arts International, Dance Advance, Independence Foundation, the PA Council on the Arts, DanceLINK, and others. In 2003, she was awarded The Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Choreography. She has been dancing for the Leah Stein Dance Company since 1992.

MICHELE TANTOCO has been a member of Leah Stein Dance Co. (LSDC) since 2002 and is happy to be with Leah again for the Carmina affair. Michele has been in Philadelphia performing and collaborating with many choreographers for nearly four years! In the Summer 2004 she travelled and performed in Bucharest and Bytom, Poland with LSDC. Four days later she was in Indonesia with Aryani Manring for Jakarta's International Dance Festiva, thanks in part to a WOO Leeway Grant. She was most recently in works by Myra Bazell and Aryani Manring for the Fringe Festival 2004, and will be seen again in Fringe 2005.

LEE SHAPLEY began working with Leah Stein Dance Company upon return to Philadelphia in January 2005. He is a founding member of the New York based collaborative dance theater group, De Facto Dance since 2000 with whom he has danced, co-directed and done set design for works performed in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Connecticut. In addition to his work with Leah and De Facto, Lee has also worked with the Brian Brooks Moving Company, Mia Chiarrochi, JoAnna Mendl Shaw and many other independent choreographers based in New York. In addition to being a dancer and choreographer, Lee is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique.

OLASE FREEMAN is a dancer/choreographer living in Philadelphia, PA. Currently Olase dances and performs with Headlong Dance Theater, in addition to Jane Comfort & Co., as he continues his development as teacher and choreographer. Olase is also co-artistic director of bkSOUL, an exercise in soul and form, with Grace Jun in San Diego. Olase remains beholdant to the information he acculmulated while working and performing with Marlies Yearby's Movin' Spirits Theater, The Richard Bull Dance Theater (choreographic improvisation), and Terry Creach's Creach/Dance. A partial list of additional choreographers and collaborators with whom Olase has had the opportunity to work includes Martha Bowers, Nicholas Leichter, Leslie Partridge, Wendy Perron, Lower Left Dance (San Diego). Heavily influenced by his friends and mentors, the late Cynthia Novack and Richard Bull, Olase continues his journey using spirals, rhythm and breath as tools to integrate disparate movement vocabularies (hiphop, contact improvisation, yoga, martial arts) into a release technique that is dynamic, organic and evolving. Olase's choreographic work, both as a co-director of bkSOUL and independently has been performed in such diverse venues as The Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Movement Research at Judson Church, Link's Hall (Chicago), the Cunningham Studio, Joyce/Soho, Dixon Place, Thelma Hill (Long Island University), as well as the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. As a teacher Olase has taught workshops and classes internationally at the Firkin Crane, Cork City, Ireland, Curitiba and Londrina, Brazil, Congresso Internacional de Danza a nivel Baja California, Mexico, and nationally via the DanceCenter at Columbia College (Chicago), Link's Hall, CalState San Marcos, Sushi Performance Inc. (San Diego), Mountlake Terrace Recreation Pavilion, (Seattle, WA).