Kristine Elliott

Following a professional career of fifteen years as a company member of American Ballet Theatre and the Stuttgart Ballet, Kristine Elliott now dedicates herself to teaching, coaching, and mentoring aspiring dancers.

As Director of Ballet in the Dance Division of the Department of Drama, Kristine teaches classical ballet at all levels, in addition to coaching students in both repertory and performance. From 2000-2003, she served as Faculty Adviser to the Cardinal Ballet, culminating with a performance of George Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments,” courtesy of the Balanchine Trust, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Balanchine’s birth.
With support from Stanford University, Kristine has traveled to South Africa for three consecutive years to teach ballet and conduct research in Johannesburg and the townships of Cape Town. Through her work with the Dance For All program in Guguletu, near Cape Town, she has discovered how the study of ballet can change thelives of children from the most impoverished communities. Her work has also been supported by grants from the Flora Foundation and many private individuals.

During her dancing career, Elliott worked with luminaries such as Rudolph Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Natalia Markova, Fernando Bujones, and George Balanchine; performed in the original casts of choreographies by Twyla Tharp, Antony Tudor, and Jiri Kylian; danced principal roles in Giselle, Coppélia, The Nutcracker, Raymonda, Theme and Variations, and Miss Julie; and performed in film and television.

Since 1990, Kristine has been a guest teacher for company class at American Ballet Theatre in New York and San Francisco. She has been a guest teacher since 1996 at Ballet Theatre’s Summer Intensive Workshop in New York City, where she teaches advanced ballet technique and repertory to selected students. In 2004, she expanded her summer guest teaching schedule to include the Extreme Ballet Program at Kaatsbaan International Dance Center in Tivoli, New York.

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Diane Frank

After completing a B.F.A in Theater (Ohio University) and an M.A. in Dance (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), Diane Frank taught for four years in the Dance Department at the University of Maryland, where she was a founding member of the Maryland Dance Theater. She then moved to New York City to begin an eleven-year career with Douglas Dunn and Dancers, touring nationally and internationally. As a scholarship student, she was invited by Merce Cunningham to join the teaching staff of the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, where she taught for eight years. At Cunningham’s request, she taught both technique and repertory at the American Center’s Atelier Cunningham. A frequent guest teacher at the Paris Opera, she assisted Douglas Dunn in both the creation of new work for the Opera and the setting of established repertory. Frank has been the recipient of seven NEA Choreography Fellowships for collaborative choreographic projects with Deborah Riley, as well as commissions from the Jerome Foundation, DTW, Dance Bay Area, and Meet the Composer, and Arts Silicon Valley. Her work has been performed both in the United States and abroad.

At Stanford since 1988, Frank teaches intermediate and advanced modern technique, choreography, and mentors graduate and undergraduate student dance projects. She organizes and advises Stanford’s student participation in the American College Dance

Festival as well as other Divisional dance education and performance projects on- and off-campus. She is the Co-Director of the Dance Division's annual concert, and also organizes numerous choreographic commissions by guest artists for Stanford student dancers, for which she frequently acts as Rehearsal Director. In 2005, she played a significant role in the development of Stanford Lively Arts’ campus-wide interdisciplinary arts event “Encounter: Merce,” organizing its “Music and Dance by Chance” commissions, as well as an IHUM lecture series on Cunningham’s video dances and concert repertory.

Most recently, Frank has been instrumental in developing a number of residency projects and artistic collaborations for the Dance Division, notably the recent class and repertory reconstruction project of Anna Halprin’s Myths as well as Under the skin, a collaborative performance project bringing together artists, physicians and residents from the Medical School, and community performers. She also recently taught “The Duets Project,” a performance class that examined partnering through duet repertory. In the spring of 2008, she will teach a new course, “Figure/Ground: Site-Specific Dance Performance in Outdoor Environments.” Complementing this course, she has conceived and organized Red Rover, a series of commissioned site-specific dance performances which will take place on the grounds of Stanford campus on May 28, 2008. Red Rover, a collaborative effort with Stanford Lively Arts, has been awarded support from the Stanford Initiative for Creativity and the Arts. Frank is a frequent guest teacher at Bay Area dance studios, colleges, and universities. A strong proponent of arts education, she consults and volunteers in the development of dance and live arts activities for public schools and the community. She also directs the Dance Division’s summer dance intensive for high school students through US Performing Arts. Frank is currently on the steering committee for the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts.

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Aleta Hayes

Aleta Hayes is a contemporary dancer, choreographer, performer, and teacher. Before her appointment at Stanford, Ms. Hayes taught for eight years at Princeton University in the Program in Theater and Dance and the Program in African American Studies. While at Princeton, Ms. Hayes developed pedagogically innovative courses that combined cultural and performance history, theory, and performance. She has also taught at Wesleyan University, Swarthmore College, and Rutgers University. Ms. Hayes holds an M.F.A. in Dance and Choreography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A., with Departmental Honors, in Drama, Dance and the Visual Arts from Stanford University (1991). 

Aleta Hayes lived and worked in New York City for fifteen years, choreographing solo and group dance pieces, in which her performances often interpolated acting and singing. Highlights include: Hatsheput, presented at the Place Theater, London and St. Marks Church, New York; Tarantantara, presented at Jacob’s Pillow; and La Chanteuse Nubienne (written by playwright Daniel Alexander Jones), performed for Movement Research at Judson Church. Ms. Hayes collaborated, as choreographer and dance/vocal soloist, with the poet Yusef Komunyakaa and composer William Banfield, on Ish-Scoodah, a chamber opera with dance about the nineteenth century African American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis. She also had leading roles in major works by other artists such as Jane Comfort (the trip-hop dance/opera Asphalt, with a book by Carl Hancock Rux) and Robert Wilson (the opera The Temptation of St Anthony, with gospel and other African American spiritual music forms and libretto by Bernice Johnson Reagon). Ms. Hayes has continued to perform in the subsequent international presentations of The Temptation of St Anthony. 

In 2004, Ms. Hayes returned to Stanford on a Ford Foundation Resident Dialogues Fellowship through the Committee on Black Performing Arts, for which she created The Wedding Project, a performance piece of multiple genres illustrating the evolution of American social dance through the narrative of African American wedding traditions. She extended this "theater of mixed forms" (the critic Anna Kisselgoff’s term) into community dialogue when she was a 2005 Peninsula Community Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Eastside Preparatory School in East Palo Alto. That residence culminated in The ReMix Project, where she collaborated with students to create and perform a montage of music, monologue, and movement examining student aspirations in a low-income, racially-mixed neighborhood. 

In the winter of 2005, Ms. Hayes had the lead acting role in the Stanford performance of Suzan-Lori Park’s In the Blood, directed by Professor Harry Elam. In the spring of 2006, she choreographed, danced, spoke, and sang a multimedia solo piece, Deianeira (an adoption of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis) created for Ms. Hayes and directed by Drama and Classics Professor Rush Rehm.

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Richard Powers

Richard Powers is one of the world’s foremost experts in American social dance, noted for his choreographies for dozens of stage productions and films, and his workshops in Paris, Rome, Prague, London, Venice, Geneva, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo as well as across the United States and Canada. He has been researching and reconstructing historic social dances for thirty years and is currently a full-time instructor at Stanford’s Dance Division. Powers was selected by the Centennial Issue of Stanford Magazine as one of Stanford University’s most notable graduates of its first century. In 1999 he was awarded the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for distinctive and exceptional contributions to education at Stanford University.

Richard Powers Home Page: http://richardpowers.com

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