Artist's Salon Featuring Aleta Hayes - Dancing with Jiajia on the Spine of the Temple of Heaven
The Clayman Institute's winter artist's salon is excited to welcome Aleta Hayes, a contemporary dancer, choreographer, performer, and teacher.
In December 2013, Aleta Hayes was awarded a cultural exchange residency in China through the U.S State Department.
For this salon, Aleta will share stories and lessons learned about how a friendship between an African American Choreographer and Dancer and a Chinese Dance scholar and dancer, transformed the way she looks at her own performance making process and dance technique- Liquid Flow, forever.
Aleta Hayes is a contemporary dancer, choreographer, performer, and teacher. She holds an M.F.A in Dance and Choreography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A. in Drama, Dance and the Visual Arts from Stanford. Hayes has taught at Wesleyan University, Swarthmore College, Rutgers University, and Princeton University, where she developed pedagogically innovative courses that combined cultural and performance history, theory, and performance.
In 2004, Hayes returned to Stanford on a Ford Foundation Resident Dialogues Fellowship through the Committee on Black Performing Arts to create The Wedding Project, a performance piece of multiple genres illustrating the evolution of American social dance through the narrative of African American wedding traditions. In 2005, Hayes was named a Peninsula Community Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Eastside Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, where she led The ReMix Project—a montage of music, monologue, and movement examining student aspirations in a low-income, racially-mixed neighborhood. Most recently, Hayes founded The Chocolate Heads Movement Band in 2009 (a collective of dancers, musicians, visual artists, performance poets and writers), and has collaborated with performer Cooper Moore to create a dance-music installation called “Singing the Rooms—Performance of the Everyday.”