Hermesdorf & Mathias

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. MOTIONLAB had reached hundreds, if not thousands, of students across the globe.

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.

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