bio
Performance artist, dancer, filmmaker, and choreographer, Catherine Galasso's motivation has been to find a unique mode of expression that extends beyond traditional boundaries between media. She combines the ephemeral qualities of performance with the illusive permanence of film and video in order to create cutting-edge and provocative narratives. Although her pieces differ greatly in theme and execution, they are for the most part based on modern myth and idiosyncratic stories that inspire and move her. In terms of content, the eclectic pieces that constitute Catherine’s body of work -- such as her dance/theater/video piece about the man with the Guinness Record for being struck by lightning seven times, her experimental documentary on a Black student rebellion of 1969, and her dance about 19th century female hysterics of the Salpêtriére Hospital in Paris -- are united by an ongoing fascination with stories of human struggle.
Since an early age, Catherine has been exposed to leading avant-garde artists on an international level through her parents. She was born in New York and grew up in Italy with her father, the dance/theater composer Michael Galasso who worked with various artists such as Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs, Karole Armitage, and Hong Kong film director Wong Kar Wai, among others. Catherine holds a European Baccalaureate from the Art Institute in Venice, Italy, and that city became her gateway to both the contemporary art scene -- with its international biennials, annual theatre, dance, music, and film festivals as well as to its rich history of art. On the one hand, the performing arts that she was exposed to there constitute the bulk of her inspiration as a choreographer, particularly the works by Nigel Charnock, Ismael Ivo, Benoît LaChambre, Carolyn Carlson, Robert Wilson, and William Forsythe. On the other hand, studying art history at an art school in one of the world’s most architecturally stunning cities contributed to Catherine’s strong sense of spatial composition, color, texture, emotion, and facial expression.
Catherine has been choreographing professionally since she graduated from Cornell University in 2006. So far she has performed her dance work at a wide range of prestigious venues in the US as well as in Eastern Europe. She moved to San Francisco to take advantage of its open-minded and experimental dance scene, quality of life, affordable rehearsal space, and growing performance opportunities. In the first six months of her career, she premiered three new works and was offered a Three-Year Artist Residency with ODC Theater San Francisco. She now lives and works in both San Francisco and New York City.
The diverse range of Catherine’s work reflects her multi-disciplinary artistic background. She is a video-maker as well as dance-maker. She has directed, shot, and edited her own documentary and experimental films, and she creates the video accompaniment, as well as edits the soundscape for almost every one of her multi-media performances. For example, in Frames of Mind, a piece in which each of the 4 dancers carries a television set with his or her own face on the screen, she interviewed each of the dancers, then edited their monologues so that the televisions, when in synch, seemed to be in conversation with one another.
Linked to Catherine’s diverse artistic background is her desire to expand the audience for dance by making her work more accessible by creating a balance between narrative and abstract elements, and juxtaposing technology and tradition. She is anxious to get dance out there to a larger audience, and to bridge the gap between street performance and opera houses, without sacrificing the sophisticated aesthetic of contemporary art.
Catherine received the 2006 Outstanding Student Artist Award from Cornell University for her cross-disciplinary artistic accomplishments as a student, and her multi-media work, Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice, was awarded Most Original Theater Production by the International Theater and Film Festival Skena UP in Pristina, Kosovo. Catherine is an Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco’s ODC Theater, a three-year engagement, by invitation of ODC Theater Director Rob Bailis. She made her NYC debut at BAX/ Brooklyn Arts Exchange curated by Faye Driscoll, in Brooklyn, New York, in April 2008, and since then has performed her work at Danspace Project, Dance New Amsterdam, Duo Theater and The Chen Dance Center. In 2009 she received commissions from The San Francisco Film Society, ODC Theater, and Duo Theater, as well as a residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, for which she created a dance theater installation inside a former bank vault on Wall Street. She is currently developing a work about the Lumiere Brothers, the progress of which is being documented through an online Blog: lumieredance.wordpress.com
photo above by Andrea Basile