Tara Brandel is an Irish choreographer, contemporary dancer,
aerialist, and contact improviser, and has been
choreographing extensively since 1990. Her work has been
shown in Cork, Dublin, London, Berlin, San Francisco, Seattle,
Egypt, Canada, and Australia.
She trained with Steve Paxton and Kirstie Simpson in Contact
Improvisation 1983-86 at Dartington College, England, and has a
BA in Dance Theatre from the Laban Centre, London, 1990. Her
aerial mentors include Genevieve Mazin, Terry Sendgraff, and Jo
Krieter. She has just completed a two-year dance Dance
Residency at Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre, which included a
retrospective exhibition of 25 years of her choreography.
Most recently she performed her solo Gawky and
Awkward at the San Francisco International Arts
Festival, was nominated as part of Best Performance Ensemble at
Dublin Fringe 2015, and was commissioned by the Downtown
Contemporary Arts Festival festival in Cairo to make a
site-specific integrated dance piece for their festival. Her
short dance film CAR screened at the Contact
Dance International Film Festival 2017 in Toronto. She is
currently touring her new solo dance theatre
show Cappaghglass to Cork Midsummer Festival,
Ireland; Ponderosa, Germany; DCAF, Cairo; and Fresh Festival, San
Francisco. She is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Croí
Glan Integrated Dance Company, based in Cork.
Dance Theatre Journal writes, “Brandel’s work has a startling raw
honesty . . . ambitious and oblique.”
Tara Brandel, theatre and dance graduate student, will share her
reworking of classic Irish theatre (with apologies) on
Wednesday, June 6. “Go and Come” will be performed in the Della
Davidson Performance Studio in Nelson Hall at 4:30 p.m. The
presentation is free.
According to Brandel, the work in progress is a social experiment
that is post Celtic Tiger, post Celtic revival, post whatever…
The one-act features undergraduate student Rose Kim,
doctoral student Jesse Stokes, and graduate student Justin
Streichman and is devised and directed by Brandel.
The fall quarter edition of “Outside the Lines 1” will feature
guest artist Rachel
Berman, a former dancer of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and
the U.S. premiere of a work by Tara Brandel, artistic
director of Ireland’s Croí
Glan Integrated Dance Company.
