About

Kathleen Hermesdorf was a dancer, performer, choreographer, curator, producer, and teacher.

She was a stunning artist and a generous builder of community.
She was an abundant mover, a literal shaker, an incredible force of nature.
She was a convener of dreamers, a home for unruly creative impulses.
She was a stellar human - graced with grit and humor and love and generosity - whose movement and teaching transformed those in her sphere in innumerable ways. 

Kathleen Margaret Hermesdorf was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 31, 1967 to a warm, Catholic family. When she was three years old her family moved to the suburbs of Chicago and it was here at a local studio that Kathleen first learned to love dance. She studied mostly jazz, which was popular in the area, and her family noted that art soon became the center of her life. In 1976, the family moved to the Netherlands and then Belgium for a few years, where Kathleen learned to speak Dutch and had the opportunity to travel extensively, a predilection she maintained throughout her life. 

Kathleen returned to the US for high school and then continued her formal studies in dance during college. She earned a BFA in Dance from Western Michigan University and then an MFA in Dance Performance and Pedagogy from the University of Illinois-Champaign. Her university studies allowed her to dance and train with different choreographers, to explore dance improvisation, and to begin to more formally experiment with her own distinct movement style. She met future collaborators like Scott Wells and Sheldon Smith, performed in theatrical productions, and explored a variety of martial arts. 

Upon graduation, she and her fiancé and fellow University of Illinois MFA graduate, Scott Wells, decided to try out life as professional artists in San Francisco, California. The two arrived in the Bay in 1991 and dug in as founders and co-directors of Hermesdorf + Wells Dance Company. Wells notes that “the first show had an audience of 15, but hey, Joe Goode came by,” which seemed, at the time, its own measure of success. Kathleen and Scott eventually chose not to marry, and the company dissolved after a few vibrant years. But, the project catapulted each into their respective careers, and they collaborated occasionally on future performance endeavors, including their 2017 “Was that good for you?” at Dance Mission Theater.

As an incredibly dynamic personality and performer, Kathleen found her home in the dance scene relatively quickly. She trained and performed with Margaret Jenkins, who once described Kathleen’s movement style as akin to liquid, both “constant and dense.” She co-directed a dance company called Collusion with fellow Margaret Jenkins Dance Company dancer Stephanie Maher between 1993-1997. The two were key participants in the shaping of 848 Performance Space, an experimental haven for dancers and performance makers throughout the 1990s. Stephanie moved to Germany shortly thereafter and she and Kathleen continued making work both in the Bay Area, and in and around Berlin at K77, Tanz Fabrik, Potsdam International TanzTage Festival, and Intercontinental Collaborations, for years to come. Kathleen held a deep love for both places, and split her time between Germany and the Bay Area throughout much of her career.

In 1993, Kathleen also began to work with Contraband, a group of feminist, politically-charged, interdisciplinary artists with the inimitable Sara Shelton Mann at the helm. Sara identified Contraband as “an interdisciplinary life laboratory” which, at the time, included Bay Area dance icons Keith Hennessy, Kim Epifano, Jules Beckman, Norman Rutherford and Jess Curtis, among others. Contraband’s work was deeply physical, grounded, and spectacular in the purest sense of the term. Visual and sonic imagery was layered, often cacophonous, sometimes ritualistic. There were flowing garments, drum beats and guitars, bodies chanting, dancing, stamping the ground, and occasionally raging to the heavens. The group mined deeply personal impulses and curiosities and developed them, often via workshops, into collective physical experience. Sara explains one of the hallmarks of the company was to “to always have that feeling that something extraordinary could happen at almost any moment - so we’d best all be ready for it.”  

This ethos laid the foundation for a particular Bay Area aesthetic in experimental dance that blended the political, the visceral, and the spiritual. Participating artists were expected to bring their whole selves to not just performance scenarios, but to the practice of creating together. The performers were in deep relationship to one another and to the work as it was unfolding. The finished works and the process of making them necessitated a particular kind of presence that was inspiring to Kathleen, who was cultivating her personal aesthetic and pedagogical style. 

She continued dancing with Margaret Jenkins and Contraband throughout the nineties, making work abroad with Stephanie Maher, and exploring all the opportunities for creative collaboration that emerged. Dance became a way of life - a vehicle for exploring just about everything. Reflecting back, Kathleen noted “to dance is to investigate, synthesize and manifest the full range of the experience of being in a body—shaping physics, psychology, physiology, breathing architecture, ancient patterns and things that can be conveyed in no other way into expression and communication… to dance is to move and be moved.”

This great love of and reverence for dance would lead Kathleen to dedicate the rest of her life not just to dancing and performing herself, but to working tirelessly to build community around dancemaking. She shaped a generation of movers and shakers. They (we) flocked to her classes, workshops, training programs, and festivals to soak up the energy and attentiveness and sense of freedom that being in her sphere afforded.

Sister Hermes / MOTIONLAB 

Kathleen met Albert Mathias, a percussion based musician working in electronics, while dancing with Contraband in 1995. They first encountered one another at Theater Artaud, where Sarah Shelton Mann was living, while rehearsing for the third installation of Contraband’s Mira Cycles dances. Albert recollects that Kathleen approached him and said, slyly, “Hi! Are you Albert? Have you come to help us save the world?”

The Mira III performance toured the country, including a stop at Bates Dance Festival, where Kathleen and Albert would return to teach for years to come. The work was grueling and invigorating, and the two became fast friends and eventually lovers. When Contraband disbanded a few years later, they both felt compelled to continue working in a similar vein. The duo set out to make their own work, under the name Sister Hermes Dance Machine - though Kathleen eventually objected to the name because it conjured images of herself as a holy woman in ways that rubbed against her Catholic upbringing. In 1998, they rebranded as the dance company MOTIONLAB, with “Lab” standing for “Luscious Ambient Bodies.” MOTIONLAB was intended to be a “process/performance vehicle and training laboratory with a mission to create work of deeply integrated dance and music that is vigorously investigated and viscerally transmitted.”  

Their mission statement belies a deep commitment to being in practice together and their primary training ground was ODC, where they had recently taken over the classes previously taught by Sara Shelton Mann. The two developed a rich relationship with ODC, continuing to teach there regularly until 2008). They wanted to harness the energy they felt in working with Sara, whilst translating it anew for dancers seeking to move and be moved in a slightly different way. Always at the forefront was a spirit of investigation, and an interest in what each person in the room had to offer.  

Kathleen and Albert created performance works both locally and abroad, and Kathleen also helped to fund Albert creating his first few records. Sometimes the pieces were duets for themselves, such as the 2003 “As Above, So Below,” and sometimes larger group pieces like the 2001 “Bodies of Evidence,” with performers including Jo Kreiter, Sue Roginski, Sri Louise, Marintha Tewksbury, Dominique Zeltzman and Patricia Jiron. Sheldon Smith, Lisa Wymore, Monique Jenkinson, and many others were also frequent collaborators.

As a performer, Kathleen possessed a rare sort of magnetism, an alchemical blend of seemingly wild abandon and detailed nuance. Her prowess was clearly honed across years of finely tuned physical skill and a keen perception of her fellow dancers. It was these sorts of skills - those that cultivated both freedom and responsibility in the dancers - that Kathleen and Albert nurtured. 

Their classes became, for some, both hearth and fire. They were places where folks could gather to witness one another, and, through exploratory improvisation prompts and carefully crafted phrase-work, develop greater self-awareness as movers. They were physically challenging, with movement spiraling and careening into and out of the floor, off of the ground, and sometimes into contact with others. Classes generally began with qi gong exercises performed in a circle to attune the bodies to the room and to one another (a practice adapted from Sara Shelton Mann’s training). Next up was full-bodied improvisational exploration rather than stationary exercising of select body parts. A prompt might be to explore one of the elements - earth, wind, fire, water - in movement, or to “be electricity.” Kathleen often used alliteration to create a list of seemingly disparate concepts - grit, gravity, and generosity, for example - and then asked folks to embody them across the floor. In a 2015 interview for Bates Dance Festival, Kathleen noted that the improvisation was crucial “so that people take responsibility for their body and its habits in a different way than when I’m telling them what to do.”

Albert would play throughout, the two seemingly in perfect, unspoken communication about how to propel the class through whatever was up next. In the aforementioned interview he described how the music would begin more ambiently which “helped to clean their [dancers’] minds, clean my mind, clean their palates, open the channels.” The sonic and motive energy would build as the minutes ticked on - ebbing during the unpacking of specific maneuvers and flowing during the stitching together of movements into phrases. Dancers, sweaty and breathless, would investigate whatever Kathleen had dreamed up for them to tackle, basking in the movement and in Kathleen’s enthusiasm for the movement, in equal measure. Classes ended not with a distanced reverence or a wave goodbye, but with a collective huddle of folks vibrating to the final sounds of Albert’s music, and then, of course, thunderous applause.

Some described the classes as a sacred space - a space of ecstatic discovery and transformation, a place of collective ritual enactments that bore specific visceral meaning for those present. For others, classes even represented a place of shared cathartic experience and transcendent communion. Sri Louise, a former MOTIONLAB dancer, noted that “together they created a cathedral of community dance.” Albert, for his part, maintained that Kathleen remained very close to her Catholic family and that her midwestern religious upbringing, as well as philosophy, Chinese medicine, esoteric thought, energy work, and even a love of lycra and jazz dance all influenced the ways she approached teaching and relating to students. For them the work was spiritual, though never overtly religious or political or dogmatic. “I never saw her try to teach anybody anything,” Albert recalled. “She was just always quintessentially herself.” Kathleen had a gift for inviting the whole person into the dance, and for finding joy in the bodies in the room.

Kathleen taught around the globe, most often with Albert. She and Albert regularly accepted invitations from former students and collaborators to teach. They opted to travel far and wide even though it often meant splitting a single fee. Kathleen trained dancers in Germany, Mexico, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, France, Senegal, and in American universities and arts organizations from coast to coast, north to south. She taught regularly at Bates Dance Festival in Maine, and at ODC and eventually Kunst-Stoff in San Francisco. MOTIONLAB held an ODC Artist Residency from 2003-2008 and received several grants from local organizations including the Zellerbach Family Foundation, CHIME/MJDC, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, CASH/Theater Bay Area, and the San Francisco Arts Commission in support of their artistic work.

At this point Kathleen had indelibly made her mark in the contemporary dance world. She continued to present her own choreography. She danced with LA-based Bebe Miller Company between 2002-2009 and continued to dance with Sara Shelton Mann through 2008. She had developed meaningful international collaborations, particularly with Stephanie Maher. She had received a Goldie Award in 1994 for her work with Scott, an Izzy Award in 1999 for her dancing in Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, and a Bessie award in 2006 for her dancing with Bebe Miller. MOTIONLAB had reached hundreds, if not thousands, of students across the globe. And still, big things were on the horizon.

ALTERNATIVA, and the Alternative Conservatory 

In 2009 Kathleen presented work with Sara Shelton Mann at ODC theater under the heading “Shared Legacy.” Kathleen’s contribution, entitled, “the other edge of here is there,” was a piece inspired by thoughts about “teleportation, wanting to be in so many places at once..., how your mind bounces around.” It was a choreographic expression of a real-life dilemma with which Kathleen was grappling. Kathleen investigated, through embodied means, how to create bridges between the “heres” and “theres” in her life - and the lives of other dancers she met and worked with at the various venues and festivals that she regularly attended, like Bates, American Dance Festival, ImpulzTanz in Austria, and Ponderosa in Germany. Seemingly, she was feeling out a way to stitch these various factions together. 

Kathleen penned an essay for the Dancers’ Group publication In Dance called “Speak” about how she was engaged in finding “new ways to thrive” in a discombobulated world. The essay stands as a manifesto on dance and its ability to “investigate, synthesize, and manifest the full range of the experience of being a human being.” Embedded in the essay is a call to action for those willing to heed it, as well as Kathleen and Albert’s own response to the call - in the form of a transition. MOTIONLAB, the dance company, would become La Alternativa (and later simply, ALTERNATIVA), a production company, under which they could further support the growth of and creative exchange between burgeoning international communities of artists in Germany, Cuba, Mexico, France, and the US. They described ALTERNATIVA as an “apparatus for deeply integrated contemporary dance and music via collaboration, creation, improvisation, performance, production, curation, and education.”

One of the arms of the apparatus would be the Alternative Conservatory, developed in collaboration with Stephanie Maher in Germany and Sara Shelton Mann in SF. The conservatory offered “a training program based in practice, experience and interaction for professional-level engagement in physical techniques, improvisational forms, creative and performance endeavors, discourse, theory and critique.” Maher and Mann would teach classes and workshops. Kathleen and Albert also evolved their class content, eventually offering what they termed GUT Motives classes.

FRESH Fest, P.O.R.C.H., Fake Company, and more

The bay area expression of Alternativa’s new mission was FRESH festival, an annual festival of experimental dance and music held in January of each year. In a 2018 interview for Stance on Dance, Kathleen shared that FRESH was born largely out of an impulse to spend more time in SF, and to create a bridge between her work internationally and her work at home. There was an explicit interest in bringing folks to SF, and in fostering an experimental community here through not just performance offerings, but gatherings of various kinds including classes, pop-up labs, potlucks, music events, and forums. The inaugural year of FRESH festival in 2010 was one week long and took place at Kunst-Stoff Arts. It was strategically placed in January, a relatively slow time of year for arts programming, a time when students she had taught elsewhere might be on break, and a time when Kathleen felt artists could use a creative boost. By 2020, FRESH had grown. It extended over three weeks of incredibly diverse programming, showcasing over 75 artists from the bay area and beyond - many of whom were repeat guests of FRESH.

Kathleen was always at the helm of the festival, but never worked alone. She gathered a team of co-curators, including local legends like José Navarette and Abby Crain, as well as Layton Lachman and Ernesto Sopprani (with whom she started the festival), in order to draw in a dynamic lineup of seasoned and emerging performers, teachers, and critical thinkers. There was no application process for the festival, rather the co-curators would bring together some of their own mentors and students, folks they were inspired by, folks who were new and struggling to get a foothold, as well as folks who were long-time friends and collaborators. Kathleen often came out of pocket to support the festival.

The festival created an immersive experience of creative exploration around a single theme, with each artist interpreting it according to their interests. The most recent themes included “Tender” (2020); “Reckoning” (2019); “Antidote” (2018); “Empathy/Disruption (2017), and “Future Gaze” (2016). The theme, and the work presented, was always closely linked with a spirit of social justice and activism, a charged responsiveness to what was going on in the world, be it the housing crisis, the election results, the ominous rise of white nationalism, or climate change. Eventually FRESH fest worked like a magnet - drawing folks to SF who would sometimes stay to embark on creative careers here. Thus, it began to bolster and sustain the experimental arts community, just as Kathleen had hoped. 

Simultaneously, Kathleen was helping to develop P.O.R.C.H., a similar training program and site for international creative exchange near Berlin, in Stolzenhagen, Germany. P.O.R.C.H. stood for Ponderosa Ongoing Research and Collaborative Happenings and it offered a countryside site for immersive, multi-disciplinary exchange and embodied investigation. The program was part of Ponderosa, which was part of a larger co-operative Genossenschaft. P.O.R.C.H. differed from FRESH Festival in the sense that it was a training program with folks committing to more in-depth study, sometimes over the course of several summers. A video on the site notes that many of the participants would live together, cook together, and create together for a rather holistic, retreat-like experience. 

Kathleen and co-facilitator Stephanie Maher would often run morning sessions in movement and improvisation that were structured similarly to the classes Kathleen taught elsewhere. Sometimes, instead of starting in the studio, class would start outside, utilizing the natural surroundings. Guest artists including Meg Stuart, Francesca Scaroni, Keith Hennessey, Laura (Larry) Arrington, and others were invited to teach. Participants gushed about the feeling of community and mutuality that would develop. A video on the website shows some of them grasping at words to describe the feeling of the space that participating in P.O.R.C.H opened up for them and for their future creative endeavors. Select participants from this gathering at Ponderosa formed, under Kathleen’s direction, FAKE Company, an interdisciplinary performance group, in 2017.

In addition to these collaborations, Kathleen and Albert were working to get a training program going in Mazatlán, Mexico alongside Delfos Danza Contemporanea. The co-director of the dance company, Claudia Lavista, encountered Kathleen and Albert at Bates and invited them to collaborate. Clauda is the Co-Director and teacher at La Escuela Profesional de Danza de Mazatlán (EPDM) and after coming to work with the students there, Kathleen and Albert felt it would be a good fit for another branch of ALTERNATIVA’s work. Similar programs were in the works from 2018 on, with Marianela Boan/Boan DanzAction in the Dominican Republic, and with WILD West Cork Contemporary Dance Festival in Cork, Ireland. The vision was to have experimental training grounds across the globe where folks who knew each other could come and share work, share space, share stories, and engage in learning, growing and performing together year-round.

In the midst of this flurry of activity and international mischief making, Kathleen was diagnosed with a rare cancer, sinonasal undifferentiated carcinoma. She had slowed a bit while nursing an injury, and had begun to feel unwell, eventually suffering from seizures and bouts of dizziness that prevented her from dancing. She returned home to convalesce with her family, particularly to be near her mother, who may have been the single greatest influence in her life. She spent much of 2020 in treatment in both Houston and Milwaukee, and her body eventually succumbed to the cancer. She died on November 29, 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic. Loved ones around the globe mourned her death, sharing their memories and grief on social media platforms and via tender testimonials. 

To say Kathleen inspired people somehow seems inadequate. She moved people. Literally and figuratively moved them. She held space for them to untangle themselves and to explore with wild abandon. She facilitated a sense of community and belonging amongst folks who often felt like misfits. She exemplified a particular sort of passion for dance’s potential - as a lifestyle - that allowed for a life full of radical, exploratory, thoughtful art amidst a vibrant, international cast of friends, creative collaborators, and chosen family. 

In a 2018 interview with Jill Randall, Kathleen said, “Dance is transformational. It is a way of perceiving the world and a transmission of human and individual experience. It is how I process and prove truth. It is what makes me more alive than anything else. I find it both phenomenal and phenomenological. I love it even when I haven’t seen a great dance in ages. I love it even when I have a bad day with it. I have also met the most incredible people through dance, and these wonderful artists, friends and loves have left their marks on me. Dance is delicious and dangerous and it has shaped my life, taken me to places I never imagined. I am continually thrilled by the ride.”

The alchemical blend of grit and flight and ferocity and curiosity and discovery and tender, tender openness to the world was Kathleen’s gift. She embodied it generously, and magnificently. And her legacy lives on in so many. Thank you, Kathleen.

Thank you Melissa Hudson Bell (choreographer, teacher, and writer in the Bay Area) for putting together this beautiful story of Kathleen’s dance journey. Thanks Yvonne M. Portra for putting together the below album of Kathleen in action over the years.