September 18, 2002 Contact: Paula Mlyn

Eminent Dancer, choreographer, and Juilliard alumna
Martha Clarke joins faculty as mentor and advisor for the
Senior Production choreographers.

Writer and performer Aaron Landsman teaches
production class in the Dance Division.

The Juilliard School announces two faculty appointments to its Dance Division for the 2002-2003 school year; these will be the first faculty appointments by it’s the division’s recently appointed director, Lawrence Rhodes, who became Juilliard’s Dance Division head on July 1.

The two faculty additions are: Martha Clarke, who graduated from Juilliard in 1965 and went on to an important career as both dancer and choreographer, replaces the late Benjamin Harkarvy as mentor and advisor for the Senior Production choreographers. This position originally was filled by dancer and teacher Bessie Schönberg who died in 1997. New York based writer and performer Aaron Landsman joins the faculty to teach a production class.

Director-choreographer Martha Clarke is known for her ground-breaking, visually inspired music-theater pieces. In 1984 Clarke created a series of sketches based on the work of the 15th-century surrealist painter Hieronymus Bosch called The Garden of Earthly Delights, which went on to win both a Drama Critics Award and the L.A. Drama Critics Award. Another work, Vienna: Lusthaus, (1986), which evokes the decadence of fin de siècle Europe, won an OBIE for best new American play. In 1988, Ms. Clarke’s Miracolo d’amore was presented at the Spoleto Festival USA and at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Endangered Species, a work for performers and live animals, was created for Music-Theatre Group and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1990. In recent seasons she directed Alice’s Adventures Underground at the Royal National Theatre in London, conceived and directed An Uncertain Hour, co-commissioned by the Nederlans Dans Theater 3, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and American Dance Festival; and conceived and directed Vers la flamme, a dance-theater work based on short stories by Chekhov with music by Scriabin, also commissioned by Lincoln Center and ADF. Most recently she re-mounted and revised Vienna: Lusthaus (revisited) at the New York Theatre Workshop. In opera Martha Clarke has directed The Magic Flute for the Glimmerglass Opera and the Canadian Opera Company, Cos fan tutte again for Glimmerglass, Tan Dun’s Marco Polo for the Munich Biennale, the Hong-Kong Festival, and the New York City Opera, and most recently Gluck’s Orfeo and Euridice for the English National Opera and the New York City Opera.

Ms. Clarke was a founding member of Pilobolus Dance Theatre, and her choreography has been performed by the Nederlans Dans Theater, the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Rambert Dance Company, and Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Award in 1990 and grants from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundations. Current and future projects include creating a music-theater piece about Toulouse-Lautrec, and directing a film of Alice’s Adventures. Miss Clarke was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and is a graduate of The Juilliard School, where she studied with Anthony Tudor, José Limón, and Louis Horst.

Aaron Landsman is a New York City-based writer and performer. His solo and collaborative theater and performance art works have been presented at Performance Space 122, HERE, Chashama, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Dixon Place, among other spaces. Regionally, he has performed in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Minnesota. His monologues have been aired on public radio in New York and the midwest, and his writing was recently published in the literary journal Mudfish 11. He is currently developing two new performance works, Family Establishment and Uncle Jesus. Mr. Landsman’s work twice has been commissioned by the Jerome Foundation, and has received production and development funding from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Meet the Composer, and the Bossak/Heilbron Foundation. He is an adjunct faculty member at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, in both theater and dance. In addition, he has taught workshops on grantwriting, producing and booking for independent dance artists through The Field, a non-profit arts service organization, where he was a staff member for several years. A 2001-2002 Artist-in-Residence at HERE, he also has been awarded working residencies at Palenville Interarts Colony, and Workspace for Choreographers. Mr. Landsman is a member of the Mad Dog theater company, and has performed with many directors, composers, and choreographers including Richard Maxwell, Tory Vazquez, Andrea Kleine, and Joshua Fried; he has appeared at such spaces as SoHo Rep, The Williamstown Theater Festival, and Dance Theater Workshop. Mr. Landsman holds a bachelor of fine arts from NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing.

In July 2002 Lawrence Rhodes became the new artistic director of the Juilliard Dance Division succeeding the late Benjamin Harkarvy, who died earlier this year. For ten years Mr. Rhodes was artistic director of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal before becoming a freelance master ballet teacher to numerous dance institutions in the United States as well as important companies in Europe. He also was former chair of the dance department at NYU’s Tisch School, and an acclaimed dancer for the Joffrey and Harkness ballets, among others.