Frank and Bryan: Repertory

Complexity Addicts by Hilary Bryan integrates sound and spatial harmonics with character development and striking interactive sets. Complexity addicts accumulate as five dancer/ actor/ singers spin in harmonic chaos, cycling through twelve facets of their personalities.
"I am inspired by sacred geometry's harmonic relationships and use them to orient a wide range of characters within a personal matrix. This matrix organizes a cacophony of characters into harmonic relationships, so that they interact with musicality and rhythm, all housed within the physical body of a single performer." -- Hilary Bryan (2005)

Time Remaining The biological clock chimes and it's time for online dating in this dance theater romp. Dancers sing, manipulate clocks, and scream at their lovers on cell phones as time passes and is gone. By Hilary Bryan, who has been touring internationally for 13 years and is still single. (2004)

Surface Tension is a work by Hilary Bryan which journeys into the heart’s nether reaches. We each have regions of our heart that we keep hidden, unavailable, protected even from ourselves. Surface Tension is the outer armor which protects this inner privacy and pain and prevents us from interacting with others. (2001)

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself." (The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho)

Interrupted, concept by Dawn Frank, created in collaboration with Hilary Bryan Interrupted, a structured improvisation with original music by Bob Frank, places life with a baby center stage. (2001)

Unearthed is an evening length dance work choreographed by Dawn Frank that dramatically combines urban tales with rich, colorful images from the wet forests of California to create a surreal landscape populated by humans acting out their tender and turbulent stories with clean gestures, expansive partnering, and fluid dancing. The performers blend a passion for luxurious dancing with contact improvisation skills, dramatic flair, and a live musical score by Kristi Martel. The result is captivating, accessible modern dance for audiences of all ages. Rita Felciano of the SF Bay Guardian spotlighted Unearthed as one of ten major San Francisco performances that “whetted (her) appetite for dance.” She also described Unearthed as “highly physical,” with “strength, versatility, and a sense of humour… evoking a sense of something bursting out from the earth.”(2000)

Muscle Memory, created by Hilary Bryan in collaboration with singer-songwriter Mychelle Colleary, is at once a movement solo and a vocal duet. This piece fuses movement and voice into one form: the entire body becomes a medium to express an inner landscape of intangible and abstract memory. (1999)

Doubt is a duet choreographed by Dawn Frank and Hilary Bryan which investigates the role of self-confidence in personal relationships. Accompanied by singer/songwriter Bob Frank, Doubt uses unison and athletic partnering to explore the debilitating nature of self-doubt as it infects ourselves and, consequently, those around us. The piece involves athletic partnering and a series of unison variations. (1997)

Falling, by Hilary Bryan, uses five dancers to explore the isolation and fear associated with falling in love (or with falling into synch with a new crowd). Movement material for the group is based on water, because water can be both mysteriously inviting and deadly, as can succumbing to our attractions. Movement, which ebbs and flows seductively like a wave and swirls playfully like an eddy, is developed with the dancers. Partnering techniques from contact improvisation shape the flow of movement: groups of two or three lift and catch one another to show the caring and supportive relationship between dancers in the group. (1997)

Floating, by Dawn Frank, places two women, a dancer and an actress, on stage together to tell their shared story through two different mediums. The characters, Jade (the dancer) and Hazel (the actress), clearly influence each other without ever actively interacting. Instead, recurring images in the text and movement work together to unite these two people who are incapable of connecting with each other. These characters were developed in a series of stories written by Dawn Frank, and the monologue has been refined with the help of the actress, Lisa Frank. (1997)

Flight is a trio choreographed by Dawn Frank for Hilary Bryan, Dawn Frank, and Kimiko Guthrie, with live vocals by Kristi Martel. Flight uses soaring and restrained bird imagery, hypnotic repetition, and suspended partnering to examine the fierce and mutable nature of close female friendships. The piece uses very slow, deliberate movements that spiral and build into intricate lifts and elaborate unison work. (1997)

	Our work explores a myriad of human relationships using many different stylistic approaches, including pure movement, contact improvisation, and dance-theater. Our creative processes also vary widely, from beginning with a clear idea and drawing it out with dancers in rehearsal, to beginning with bodies in space and developing a theme through the rehearsal process. Regardless of origin or style, performance is where our work is ultimately born. Each of the pieces described below was created in rehearsal and given life in performance.
	Click here for repertory list with performance dates.		Click here for works created 1992 - 1996.