A Thought-Leader In Family & Children’s Dance Classes | Houston, TX
Frame Dance is a thought leader in dance education, inspiring the next generation of movers, makers, and world changers by offering dance classes for adults & children, multi-generational ensembles, professional performances, networking events, and film festivals. We are nestled between West U and the Museum District.
We believe in developing the whole dancer, teaching critical life skills such as creative thinking, leadership, collaboration, and resilience through our artful and playful dance curriculum at our studio and in partner schools.
Our adult modern dance classes are designed to offer you the joy and magic that’s possible when you create space in your life to move, to grow, and to share in the creative process with a like-hearted community.
For more than ten years, Frame Dance has brought radically inclusive and deeply personal contemporary dance to Houston. Led by Founder and Creative Director Lydia Hance, whom Dance Magazine calls “the city’s reigning guru of dance in public places,” the professional company is made up of six acclaimed co-creators committed to collaboration. Frame Dance has created over 50 unique site-specific performances and nine dances for the camera screened in festivals all over the United States and Europe. With an unrelenting drive to make dance in relationship to environment, Frame Dance has created dance works for and with METRO, Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, Houston Parks Board, Plant It Forward Farms, CORE Dance, Rice University, Houston Ballet, 14 Pews, Aurora Picture Show, and the Contemporary Arts Museum. Frame Dance’s productions were described by Arts + Culture Texas Editor-in-Chief Nancy Wozny as “some of the most compelling and entertaining work in Houston.” Creative Director Lydia Hance is a champion of living composers and is dedicated to work exclusively with new music.
Little Framers, MultiGen Framers, Adult Workshops Children’s Classes offer a cohesive education of modern dance technique, rehearsal, and performance. Little Framers will learn how to work technically in a studio, cooperate, and collaborate in a rehearsal like professional dancers do.
In Adult classes (Multi Gen, Workshops) students discover dance as a means of self-expression, exploration, and community connection through creative experiences. Based in modern dance technique and improvisation, these classes welcome beginners of all ages and advanced students who are looking to rejuvenate their creative practices.
I just watched the second weekend of Barn Storm Dance Fest, and last weekend I was able to see Program 1. Barn Storm Dance Fest is a three-weekend dance festival produced by Dance Source Houston– Houston’s dance service organization. Dance Source Houston has exploded in the last couple of years. They have taken over The Barn (formerly Barnevelder Performing Arts Complex), and worked to raise the funding to subsidize rentals for artists and arts organizations; They have started an Artist in Residency Program (AIR) for three artists each year to use the space to develop new work; They now offer Micro Grants for production costs (Frame Dance is eternally thankful!); and they produce the Barn Storm Dance Festival to showcase dance from Houston and other Texas cities.
What strikes me (as someone who is not participating as an artist in this festival) is the importance for dancers and choreographers to convene. It has been special to watch pieces from veteran and emerging choreographers on the same show. This is very valuable for the health of dance in our city. The shows have been running flawlessly, and lit beautifully. I imagine you’ll have your favorites, some that don’t touch you as poignantly, and others that will push you a little as a viewer. That’s the beauty of the festival format– you get to see so much. I walk away from the first two programs proud of our city and all of the dance in it! Thank you, Dance Source Houston, for bringing these artists together and producing such an extensive festival, and thank you to the artists for making dance. You have two more chances to see it this weekend and a full weekend for Program 3. Tickets and info here.
Frame Dance calls for smart, musical dancers with an open mind, a sense of adventure and professionalism, a willing spirit and an embracing strength from both men and women to partner and support their fellow Framers. Dancers must have a desire to work in non-traditional spaces, experiment with new ideas, and a willingness to be involved in the creative process and in the community.
Please bring a CV, and RSVP to Lydia.Hance@framedance.org.
photo by Lynn Lane Frame Dance ranges from athletic, to suspended, to subtle.photo by Lynn Lane Frame Dance works with adults and children
METRODances Frame Dance performs in alternative spaces
photo by David DeHoyos Frame Dance works with emerging composers and live music
Frame Dance explores audience connection and integration
You may have heard about Lammily, the Barbie modeled after a real 19 year old girl. She’s pretty great. Check her out in this video calling out our culture’s obsession with image over accomplishments.
Frame Dance casts a vision for the next five years with steel string guitars, percussion toys, and sophisticated dancing
Houston, TX—February 5, 2015. Framed in Five is a celebration of Frame Dance Productions and the vibrant “Framer” community they have grown over their first five years. The program will feature new dance and live music ranging from surprising and intricate percussion, to a curious and whimsical guitar duo, to an emotive string quartet that “depicts the wind and rainfall during a rain shower.”
Framed in Five runs May 1 & 2, 2015 in the Margaret Alkek Williams Dance Lab at The Houston Ballet Center for Dance. This vibrant program will feature winners from the Frame Dance Music Competition: composers Joel Love (Austin), Gabriel José Bolaños (California), and Robert Honstein (Boston). Baylor Percussion Ensemble, a steel string guitar duo, and string quartet will perform with Frame Dance in three new pieces.
Frame Dance’s newest programs: Little Framers Children’s Ensemble and the Multi-Generation Ensemble will join the cast for a special premiere, Lightscape. Lydia Hance has choreographed a dance that integrates the professional dance company, the children’s ensemble, and adults of different ages from around Houston revealing the depth of age, the vitality of youth, and the resonance of vulnerability.
Artistic Director Lydia Hance will reveal the vision for Frame Dance in the next five years with an exciting new video.
Margaret Alkek Williams Dance Lab
Houston Ballet Center for Dance
601 Preston St.
Houston TX 77002
May 1 at 7:30pm, May 2 at 2pm and 7:30pm
On street, lot, and garage parking
Cost: $11-22, family rates and group ticketing available
About the Choreographer and Composers: Dubbed Houston’s “queen of curious locations,” Lydia Hance is the Executive and Artistic Director of Frame Dance Productions. She has been named an Emerging Leader by Dance/USA and has been leading Frame Dance in performances from the Galveston pier onto the METRO light rail, into the backs of U Haul trucks, and into museums, stages, and warehouses throughout Texas for the past five years. A champion of new music composers, her work deepens interdisciplinary collaborations and investigates the placement of dance in our lives. She is the former Education Director of Hope Stone Inc., and has recently launched the children’s ensemble Little Framers. She is a choreographer, curator, filmmaker, educator, and dance writer originally from the California Bay Area. She holds degrees in Dance Performance and English Literature from SMU and trained at the Taylor School, Graham School, Tisch School of the Arts, Limon Institute and SMU.
Gabriel José Bolaños Chamorro is a Nicaraguan-American composer and guitarist. He is pursuing his PhD at UC Davis. He received a bachelor’s
degree from Columbia University in 2007 where he studied composition with Fabien Lévy and Sebastian Currier, and orchestration with Tristan Murail. He has also worked as a freelance musician in New Haven, CT, and was a professor of theory, analysis and guitar at the Casa de los 3mundos music academy in Granada, Nicaragua. His work draws upon a variety of interests including linguistics, spectralism and the physical properties of sound, psychoacoustics and geology.
Joel Love’s music has been performed by The Aura Contemporary Music Ensemble, The California State University Los Angeles Wind Ensemble, Da Camera of Houston’s Young Artists, The Boston New Music Initiative, the Ohio State University Wind Symphony, the Texas A&M University Symphonic Winds, the Lamar University A Capella Choir and Wind Ensemble, the University of Texas Wind Symphony, and exhibited at many art galleries throughout the United States. Joel’s first work for wind ensemble, Aurora Borealis, was recently selected for performance at the 2013 SCI National Conference. In a recent review of 2013 SXSW events, Capital Public Radio’s Nick Brunner commented that “The Peace of Wild Things” was a “gorgeous piece of music, wafting along into the ether.” He recently finished is doctorate from the University of Texas Austin.
Celebrated for his “roiling, insistent orchestral figuration” (New York Times) and “glittery, percussive pieces” (Toronto Globe and Mail), composer Robert Honstein is a composer of orchestral, chamber, and vocal music. Robert has received awards, grants and recognition from Carnegie Hall, Copland House, the New York Youth Symphony, ASCAP, SCI, the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the Young New Yorkers Chorus, the Lake George Music Festival, the Boston New Music Initiative, the Ithaca College Chamber Orchestra, and New Music USA. Robert co-founded Fast Forward Austin, an annual marathon new music festival in Austin, TX. Described as “the first ever classical music event in Austin to make its own beer koozies” (Austin American Statesmen), Fast Forward Austin features local and national, cutting-edge artists in a “welcomingly relaxed venue… [that] tapped into what is so great about the Austin vibe: a community of people who are artistically curious, non- doctrinaire, and unpretentious” (NewMusicBox).
Week 3 in our series that came from our installation at Fresh Arts. The piece was called The Black Space, and included these tiny silent dances meant to be seen on your smart phones.
It’s week 2 in review of our tiny silent dance series made for our Fresh Arts installation called The Black Space. These were made to be seen on you smart phones. Enjoy!
For links we like we thought we’d throw back to some Frame Dance Tiny Dances from our show called The Black Space. We made a series of these tiny silent films that were made to be viewed on a smart phone. Stay tuned for the second one next Friday.
Happy New Year! Beginnings are my favorite. There’s so much hope and there hasn’t been time for discouragement yet. There hasn’t been time yet for failure or hurt. There hasn’t been time to hurt others. It’s clean and everyone is trying to be his or her best self. I wonder, why can’t each new day have the promise of the new year? I think it requires stepping beyond the past.
2014 has been a fabulous year for us at Frame Dance, and so much because of the support of our audience, friends, donors, and family. It’s not easy creating something out of nothing, and now in our fifth year, we feel like we really have something to be proud of. The dancers and collaborators have worked so hard, and I am truly in awe of how much of themselves they have put into the work we’ve done. Sometimes it can be lonely figuring out how, exactly, to lead a new arts organization– how to
Photo by David DeHoyos
pursue a vision, but be smart and strategic in the practicalities, thinking of the artists and how to challenge them and showcase their strengths, thinking of our community and the art that would enrich it. There are a lot of moving pieces I consider in how to make Frame Dance a thriving, growing, relevant arts organization serving its community.
The dance we’ve made has the fingerprint of so many artists. Frame Dance is a manifestation of dancers, composers, photographers, writers, children, parents, musicians, chefs…(shall I go on?) It is the manifestation of the board and of myself and the many, many people who have fought for it. It is the manifestation of those who have given us opportunities, spoken and written supportive words, commissioned new works, and those who have given us a critical eye, and a corrective voice.
While it is cleaner to let go of the past while embarking on this new year, I choose to remember the past, with gratitude and a breath of distance. Onward and upward, soldiers. There’s more art to be made. You are a part of it whether you create it, support it, experience it, or share it. We need all of you.
