Artist Bio

Nina Haft & Company

T:here (World Premiere)
Presented by Nina Haft & Company

Home. Exile. Resistance. An invitation, a landscape, walls, borders and checkpoints. A young life cut short, a funeral. New understandings of resilience in the face of oppression and Israeli occupation. In 2010, Nina Haft & Company traveled to the Middle East, where they met Palestinian people striving for the right of return to their homes and land of origin. This is our journey.

NINA HAFT & COMPANY (NH&Co.) is known for works that foster a deep understanding of place. Recent projects emphasize cultural commentary and site- specific work, including Debris/Flows, a performance installation about landscape and the culture of nature; SKIN: One Becomes Two, a travelogue about borders and the Middle East; 36 Jewish Gestures; The Further Adventures of Comrade Valentina; Mountain Views: Still/Life with Dancing; and Mit a Bing, Mit a Boom! A Klezmer Dance.

NH&Co.'s Dance in Unexpected Places Series presents dance in dockyards, libraries, pubs, synagogues, parking lots, cemeteries and other liminal spaces, in a surreptitious campaign to insinuate dance into everyday life.

In addition to regular performances in the San Francisco Bay Area, Nina has shown her work throughout the United States and internationally, including appearances with Dance Umbrella in Boston, Central Park Summerstage in New York City, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the University of Koln, Germany, FINIST in Novosibirsk, Siberia, and on public television. Recent international projects have included performances and teaching engagements at the Amman Contemporary Dance Festival (2010), the Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival (2010) and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (2010).

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NINA HAFT is Artistic Director of Nina Haft & Company, with whom she has created provocative works of cultural commentary since 2000. Nina’s work in New Jewish Performance has been profiled in Dance Magazine and received support from the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, Margaret Jenkins’ Dance Company (CHIME), the Conney Project on Jewish Arts (UW-Madison) and Purdue University (IN). NH&Co. is also known for the Dance in Unexpected Places Series, presenting performances in dockyards, synagogues, parking lots, libraries, train stations, bars, cemeteries and other liminal spaces. NH&Co. is a resident company of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center.