Jane Comfort is a choreographer, writer and director whose work has been produced throughout the United States, in Europe and Latin America.  She received a BESSIE Award for Underground River and a recent New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Performance Art.

Jane Comfort grew up in Oak Ridge, TN and received a degree in painting at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been making interdisciplinary work since 1978. She and her company have performed throughout the United States, in Europe and Latin America. Jane also choreographs for theater and opera. She recently choreographed Salome for Chicago's Lyric Theater with Deborah Voigt in the title role.  She choreographed the Broadway musical Amour, with music by Michel Legrand and direction by James Lapine, and was Associate Director/Choreographer of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Broadway musical Passion, which won a Tony Award for best musical. She choreographed NYC's Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing as well as Playwrights Horizons' musical Wilder.

Jane Comfort has received 13 choreography fellowships and company grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Doris Duke Award for New Work, and support from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation, NPN Creation Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts, Performing Americas, Arts International, Altria Group, New England Foundation for the Arts, The Mary Flagler Cary Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, and others.

Recent commissions include The Joyce Theater, NPN Creation Fund, the American Dance Festival, Jacob's Pillow, Jeanne Ruddy Dance, the Estonia National Ballet and two mini-musicals for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

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Heather Olson is a dancer and choreographer based in New York City since 1997.  Over the past three years, her choreography has been presented at Danspace Project's Food for Thought Series, La Mama ETC, Movement Research at the Judson Church, P.S. 122, Galapagos Art Space, Solonova Arts Festival (also at P.S. 122), and Gorillafest and LIT at 110 Grand.  In March 2008, she premiered her first commissioned work, Curious awake not possible, at Dance Theater Workshop.

As a performer, Olson has been a longtime member of both Tere O'Connor Dance and Yanira Castro + Company. She began working with O'Connor in 1997 and has been a part of the creative process of eight evening length dances, most recently Rammed Earth (2007), and including Hi Everybody! (1999) and Frozen Mommy (2004), both of which received New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awards. Since 2000, Olson has been a member of Yanira Castro + Company. She has taken part in the creation of seven works with the company including a solo titled Anthem, created for Dance Theater Workshop's 40th Anniversary Gala. With both companies, Olson has toured extensively throughout the U.S. and internationally. Additionally, she has taught technique and performance skills as part of company residencies.  As a freelance artist, she has had the pleasure of dancing with a wide variety of choreographers including Jennifer Allen, Karl Anderson, Ivy Baldwin, Levi Gonzales, and Ashley Smith (Red Dive), among others.

Olson received a BFA in dance from the North Carolina School of the Arts in 1997.  While a student there, she was awarded an artistic merit scholarship as well as a teaching scholarship, giving her the opportunity to teach 13 year old ballet students their weekly modern class.

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Deganit Shemy is originally from Israel and is based in New York.  She has performed her critically acclaimed compositions throughout Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and New York since 2002.  Her first solo was presented at The Other Dance Festival and The International Exposure Festival at the Susanne Dallal Center in Tel Aviv, where she also won a 2003 Gvanim Bemachol Award for her trio ALUM. Shemy was named “Young Choreographer of the Year” by the Israeli Ministry of Education in 2004, and won the 2003 Choreographer Award from the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation. Her work has been performed at the Habama Theater (Jerusalem), Authors House (Tel Aviv), Susanne Dallal Center (Tel Aviv), Tami House Theater (Tel Aviv), Frankfurt House (Tel Aviv), Arabic Jewish Theater (Jaffa, Israel), Tmuna Theater (Tel Aviv), Hachan Theater (Jerusalem), and the Hullon Theater (Jerusalem).

Since re-locating to New York in 2005, Shemy has gathered a group of five core dancers to form Deganit Shemy & Company. Over the past two years in New York, the company has received a three-year space grant from 92nd St Y, four artist residencies from Movement Research, Dance New Amsterdam, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and Dance Theater Workshop, and has been commissioned by P.S.122, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Harkness Dance Festival. In New York, her work has been presented at the 92nd Street Y, Joyce SoHo, Dance New Amsterdam, Dance Theatre Workshop, The Joyce Theater, Dixon Place, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and Movement Research.  She performed her latest choreography IODINE at P.S. 122 in February 2008, and will tour to Singapore Fringe Festival January 2009.  She has been commissioned to create a new evening-length work to be performed at Dance Theater Workshop in May 2009. Most recently, Shemy received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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Anna Sperber is a native of Brooklyn, NY, where she is currently based. Her work has been presented in venues throughout NYC including Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, The Brooklyn Museum of Art,  the 92nd St. Y Harkness Dance Center, Dixon Place, Joyce SoHo, and Chez Bushwick (at Shtudio Show and The Ronald Feldman Gallery), Live Sh— at the Chocolate Factory, AUNTS, and Catch! Series at P.S.122.

She is a 2006-08 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, and a recipient of NYSCA Dance Program Public Commissioning Funds.  Her work has also been supported through residencies at the Harkness Dance Center at the 92nd Street Y, SILO/Dancenow NYC, Dragon’s Egg, and the Experimental Television Center.

Anna Sperber, with composer Mario Diaz de Leon and video artist Jay King, collaborated on cinema installation, Cutting and Joining, 2005.  Additionally, she has collaborated extensively with artist and musician Peter Kerlin. Anna holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase.  In addition to her own work, she has performed in the work of Julie Atlas Muz, Isabel Lewis, Beth Gill, The Brooklyn Adult Recorder Choir, and Fritz Haeg/Animal Estates as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial.  She currently dances with Juliette Mapp, whom she has worked with for the past four years. She is a Co-curator of the Movement Research Festival Spring 08, Somewhere Out There.

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Sugar Salon 2008/09 Performance and Work Description:

Heather Olson presented in the river, concerned with uncovering the emotion lurking beneath abstraction.  The world premiere included an original sound score by James Lo, and is performed by Matthew Rogers, Kimberly Young and Olson.

Deganit Shemy presented an excerpt from her new work Arena.  Part of a larger work that will premiere at Dance Theater Workshop in April 2009, Arena explores a tight square of light, an area of opposing forces, a game with strict rules and highly organized time.  Characters move in and out of this space creating a world where reality and imagination are mixed and new realities are formed.  The work includes music by Jason Sebastian, and is performed by Robin Brown, Denisa Musiclova, Erika Eichelberger, Leah Nelson and Savina Theodorou. 

Anna Sperber premiered my imagination lives in the dark, but charlotte’s imagination lies in the forest, the first part of a new evening-length, site specific work. The piece offers intimate portraits within an exploration of light and texture, focusing on singular details to bring a heightened awareness of sensation and a distillation of time and place. my imagination lives in the dark, but charlotte’s imagination lies in the forest includes original music composed and performed live by Nate Wooley, and is danced by Charlotte Gibbons, Natalie Green and Sperber. 

Jane Comfort (2008-09 Mentor) presented an excerpt from An American Rendition, an evening-length work that premiered at the Duke on 42^nd Street in September 2008.  A work about extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and our national obsession with TV reality shows, An American Rendition incorporates found text from Missing Person’s reports, vocals by Joan la Barbara, costumes by Liz Prince, and is performed by Jane Comfort and Company dancers Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Anthony, Ellen Smith and Reba McMehan.

Photo Gallery Coming Soon!

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Sugar Salon 2008/09 Event Schedule:

June - August 2008 - Rehearsal residency at Barnard College
January 7-9, 2009 8:30pm - Sugar Salon performance at Baryshnikov Art Center.
January/February 2009 - Post-Performance Roundtable / Panel Discussion (TBA)
Fall 2009- Barnard Commission Rehearsal Period and student performances

Sugar Salon was developed in tandem with independent choreographers Tami Stronach and Kate Weare. The program is made possible in part through the support and partnership of The Barnard College Department of Dance of Columbia University under the leadership of the Department Chair, Mary Cochran.

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