TARYN LAVERY
photo by Jade Skye Hammer
Taryn Lavery, a Utah native, fuses her classical background with a desire to vitalize modern dance for broader audiences, extracting a new form of contemporary performance. Before moving to Austin in 2011, she attended the University of Alabama on scholarship and worked with Alabama Repertory Dance Theatre, Dance Alabama and Birmingham's Sanspointe Dance Company. Taryn is a founder and co-director of Austin's BLiPSWiTCH, a project-based dance company focused on collaboration and site-specific works as an avenue for community expansion. She works in and out of the studio for BLiPSWiTCH— choreographing, dancing, producing, costume constructing, and graphic designing— to co-conceptualize their seven evening length works to date, their collaborative Offbeat series— now upon its eleventh iteration— and smaller scale works and training opportunities throughout the community. Taryn is a freelance recurring dancer with Jennifer Sherburn and multimedia performance company, ARCOS, and has worked with Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company, Performa/Dance, Collide Arts, SEAM Project, L.O.L.A., Kira Blazek Ziaii, Ready/Set/Go!, Blue Lapis Light, Sky Candy and Cirque Vida; she was also a back-up dancer for bands A Giant Dog and Tinnarose, and has danced in music videos for them, The Band of Heathens, Sweet Spirit, Dr. Joe and more. Taryn is endlessly interested in expanding movement boundaries through BLiPSWiTCH and her work as a dancer and creator with other artists.
KELSEY OLIVER
photo by Tori Reynolds
KO’s never-left-Austin-long-term background went from competition kid to drill team baby to experimental academic…currently resonating as a physical theatre enthusiast, improvisor, and momentumous floorwork practitioner. She’s a choreographer, performer, and costume artist, and she loves making funky art in whatever medium she can get her hands on. Routinely in scrappy, maximalist, humor-struck collaborations, Kelsey has worked with Frank Wo/Men Collective, Rude Mechanicals, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, Magdalena Jarkowiec, Heloise Gold, Thee Gay Agenda, Body Shift, + more. Her costume concoctions and stylings have landed in work by UT’s Fall For Dance, Frank Wo/Men Collective, Erica Saucedo, Heloise Gold, The Reverie, and many solo & duet works. Kelsey received a B.F.A. in Dance in 2015, studying at the University of Texas at Austin and short-term Le Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, France. She has also been an adjudicator, choreographer, and dance instructor for studios and teams throughout Texas. She likes durational stuff, absurdist stuff, devised stuff, funny stuff, and stuff that gets soakingly athletic. She also loves her queer family with 5 fur floof children.
ALLEN PORTERIE
Allen Porterie, he/they, is honored to share space with these artists. Allen is an actor, singer, writer, and scholar based in Austin, TX. They are a third-year M.F.A. in Performance as Public Practice candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. Regional: Kinky Boots (Angel) at Uptown Players, Fire in Dreamland (Lance) at The Filigree Theatre, Bright Mother and Public Property with Salvage Vanguard Theatre. Allen can be seen in national commercial campaigns and has been featured on The Late Late Show with James Corden. As an artist-scholar, Allen is invested in cultivating safe spaces of vulnerability for Black men. Allen is represented by Collier Talent.
ERICA SAUCEDO
photo by Laura Morsman Photography
Erica Patricia Saucedo (she/her) is a dance artist, educator and organizer based in Austin, Texas. Enlivened by pursuing collaborative body-based projects that strive for decentralized power, fearless inquiry, affective curiosity, socio-political irreverence, and shameless bodies, Erica Saucedo’s choreographic commissions include works for: Offbeat X, The University of Texas at Austin, Mini Movement Fest in Dallas, First Street Studio, 92Y Street Fest, Danspace Project, Triskelion Arts, Austin Dance Festival and The Actors Fund Arts Center. She is also the co-director of Geografía–a dance festival that centralizes social justice-driven dance artists in Texas.
ALEXANDRA BASSKIAKOU SHAW
Alexandra Basskiakou Shaw directs, writes and performs new work. She is a company member of Rude Mechs theatre collective based in Austin, TX with whom she performs in Not Every Mountain (Guthrie Theater world premiere) and Contranyms (Fusebox Festival), directs a solo performance by Kirk Lynn called The Cold Record (Under the Radar Festival, Brisbane Festival, Harbourfront Festival), and directed the B. Iden Payne award-winning Fixing Troilus and Cressida.
In Austin, she directed the regional premiere of Kirk Lynn’s Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra (Museum of Human Achievement); the national premiere of Mouthful a series of interconnected plays by by Inua Elams, Neil Labute, Lydia Adetunji, Bola Agbaje, Clare Bayley, and Pedro Rozo; Joanna Garner’s The Orange Garden (UT Austin) and Patrick Shaw’s Operation Istanbul (Cohen New Works Festival). She is an associate artist with paper chairs with whom she performed in Elizabeth Doss’ Catalina d’Erauso and The Divine Narcissus.
Her plays are all about women. Works include Yvette and the Wild Shame (New Plays Now/ Signature Theatre), Althea the Garden Cantata (The Motor Company), Womanize (NYMF Mint’d Explorers), and Si, Mi Piace l’Auto (ITE/FullStop).
Alex teaches directing and playwriting in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin where she serves as Producing Artistic Director of the UTNT New Theatre festival. She trained with The Wooster Group, SITI Company, National Theatre Institute, The Fornés Institute, and with members of the RSC and Shakespeare and Company. MFA, Columbia University.
This fall, she will direct Antigonick at the Mary Moody Northern Theatre and the world premiere of Megan Tabaque’s Decapitations (Salvage Vanguard Theatre).