Dawn Kramer's choreography has appeared on 15' high scaffolding (Pipe Dream) and vast rope nets (After Ever), in sites as varied as the Back Bay Train Station and the stairway of the Boston Public Library. Her work has been performed at Jacob's Pillow, Dance Theatre Workshop in NYC, and in Holland, Belgium, Germany, and France as well as throughout New England. In 2007-2008, Kramer and Stephen Buck collaborated on two pieces involving live performance and video projections on the performers. Cracking premiered April 12, 2008 at the Pozen Center at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. It was later performed at Boston University and Jordan Hall. Katarina Miljkovic created the music, with performance by Kramer and video and lighting by Stephen Buck. This trio's new collaboration , Entanglement, was presented by the Cambridge Science Festival and Cyberarts on April 26, 2009. Kramer's current choreography uses video projections on the performer(s) to reflect on the nature of choice, the relationship of body to self and gender, and to question the idea of the self as a solid, separate reality.
Dawn Kramer is a founder of Dance Collective which she co-directed for thirty years, creating and/or performing in approximately seventy works. Her first full-evening, site specific piece, Point of View, moved up the stairway and into the windowsills of the old ICA building in Boston. Her other full-evening works involved large interactive sets designed by Dutch designer, Pieter Smit. In Foreign Fling, she climbed a mountain of defunct TV's and electronics. In One False Move, she and Smit "built" a roller coaster of a path to a height of 12' above the stage, singing, speaking several languages, and moving all the while. In After Ever, the dancers climbed, rolled, and flung themselves onto and through a hand-knotted rope net (18'x22') which dropped into the Cyclorama, bisecting the circular performance space.
During the 70's and 80's, Kramer's work often used ordinary objects from everyday life as physical, metaphorical, and expressive extensions of the performers. Works like Rag, Blue Cheer, Housewares, Conversation Piece, Pressed for Time, and Bits & Pieces reflected aspects of her life as a mother of young children, in often humorous and fractured ways. Works such as Rest Area, Intervals of Heavy Rain, Cameo, the videodance "My Place/or Yours?" and "What We Here Possess" looked at love relationships in various forms and stages. Many of Kramer's large scale works in the late 80's and 90's were presented by Dance Umbrella, in particular Pipe Dream and After Ever which were designed specifically for the huge round Cyclorama building at the Boston Center for the Arts. Choreography such as Raw Stuff (1985), Reach (1993), and Shout! (2000) explored pure movement, each in a distinct way.
Kramer received several grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Artists Foundation, the LEF Foundation, among others. A grant from the French Ministry of Culture enabled a three-month residency at the La Napoule Art Foundation in France. There she collaborated with international artists and created an evening of solo work called, Vous Etes Ici!
Kramer graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied with the late Bessie Schönberg. She is an associate professor in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Ms. Kramer had the pleasure of performing in Meredith Monk's Celebration Service in Cambridge and in From the Horse's Mouth at Jacob's Pillow and Brandeis University. In 2007-2008, Kramer appeared as "Ishtar" in John Holland's Lament for a Dead Companion in Boston and New York performances.
" In my opinion, Dawn Kramer is among the most original, thoughtful, and significant people working in a direction that dance must go if it is to free itself from the bounds of a fixed vocabulary and outworn and insular stereotypes of both ballet and modern dance, and develop serious new forms for conveying perceptions and concepts not accessible by other means. She is also an accomplished and expressive performer, realizing her ideas with dedication and conviction. Her work always inspires new nonverbal thinking."
-- Nelson Goodman
(former) Professor Emeritus of Philosophy
Harvard University
February 17, 1988
Choreographers:
Judith Chaffee, Martha Armstrong Gray,
and Micki Taylor-Pinney of Dance Collective
Seán Curran
Peter DiMuro
Composers:
Fast Forward
John Holland
Katarina Miljkovic
David Moss
Kevin Pelrine
Yuval Ron
Caleb Sampson
Laetitia Sonami
Stan Strickland
Jeff Talman
Patino Vasquez
Musicians:
Melanie Almiron
John Clark
Jeff Davis
Bridget Fitzgerald
Evan Harlan
Ron Heifitz
Randall Hodgkinson
Wanetta Jackson
Christopher O'Reilly
Merle Perkins
Annie Silberman
Sid Smart
Visual Artists/Designers:
Carol Anthony
Bebe Beard
Kate Blacker
Stephen Buck
Candace Fleming
Carol Ramsey
Pieter Smit
Video Artists:
Stephen Buck
Joe Briganti
Robin Doty
Antony Flackett
Corey Smithson
Noah Stout
Poets:
Malek Alloula
Steven Ratiner
Stephen Buck has designed lighting for Boston dance companies such as Dance Collective, Concert Dance Company and Beth Soll & Company and worked as a production manager for Dance Umbrella of Boston and technical director of First Night Boston and lighting director for Tod Machover's Brain Opera at the Media Lab at MIT. He designs for World Music, Celebrity Series and Boston Camerata. He created the video projections for Dawn Kramer' s "If I were you…", Cracking and Entanglement. A former choreographer, he has received a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Choreographic Fellowship.