by Julianna Hom
Alice Svetic (they/them), dancer+choreographer+educator, is an adjunct instructor of Dance at Hollins University where they teach ballet and contemporary dance practices. Originally from Milwaukee, WI, Alice graduated with distinction from the University of Wisconsin- Madison with a BFA in Dance and from Hollins University with a Master of Fine Arts in Dance. Their current interests lie in contemporary dance performance, dance making, and radical dance pedagogy. Their research centers around critical feminist and queer dance teaching perspectives, viewership politics, and the performative body. Alice has spent meaningful time at the B12 Festival in Berlin, San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, with Andrea Miller’s GALLIM, and under the mentorship of Alex Ketley and David Maurice in The HAVEN’s 2021 choreographic mentorship program. They have danced in the works of Alex Ketley, Banning Bouldin, Anton Lachky, Sean Curran, The Seldoms, and Katy Pyle, among many others. Alice’s choreographic works have been featured at Midwest RAD Fest 2021 and 2023, DanceWorks Chicago’s DanceChance 2021, and SALT Contemporary Dance’s 2020 SHAPE choreography festival, where their solo Lullaby was awarded first place. Alice premiered their first evening length solo performance, Departure Dances, in May of 2021 at the Backspace Gallery in Madison, WI.
My impulses in dance making feel very similar to my impulses in life making - they are impulsive, compositional, aesthetic, and referential. They are Impulsive in the way that I follow my gut and rely on instinct - queer instinct. They are compositional in how I make choices of where to place and be placed. They are aesthetic in the way that I use markers of identification - hair, clothing, color, and light - to my queer advantage, and finally, they are referential in that they link back to my queer ancestry. My life is queer, therefore so are my dances.
Within my creative processes I strive to facilitate group settings in which artists are seen, heard, and felt. Empathy and compassion are the tools used to check in and out at the beginning and end of sessions as a way to return to reality. I am curious about what can be learned from studying dance - about ourselves, our relationships to ourselves, and our relationships to others.
by orfeas skutelis