Abrepaso
Alice Blumenfeld creates new access points into flamenco and new pathways within the form, sharing her love for and profound knowledge of flamenco with audiences around the U.S. Flamenco has been the driving force in her life since she was 12, growing up immersed in flamenco culture in New Mexico. She especially enjoys sharing this art form with the next generation, bringing flamenco’s ability to open space for creative and emotional expression to students.
Blumenfeld founded ABREPASO flamenco in 2016, seeing a need for a forward-looking flamenco company in the U.S. that could break down stereotypes surrounding flamenco and allow the form to inspire creativity and community, building bridges across differences. In 2019, ABREPASO relocated to Northeast Ohio, and since then has been making a mark on the dance scene as Cleveland’s first professional flamenco dance company.
Alice Blumenfeld is a nationally recognized flamenco dance artist. In 2020, she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for choreography. She is also a Fulbright Scholar, a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and a YoungArts awardee. She holds an MFA in dance from Hollins University and a BA in Comparative Literature from New York University.
Blumenfeld is bilingual in Spanish and English.
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CAL PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT BADGES EARNED
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During Poetry Making Moves! participants will explore poetry comprehension and reading comprehension by embodying poetry through movement and sound they create. [RI 6.1 - 6.3] [Dance 6.2CR] Taking the sounds, rhythms, meter, pacing, and imagery from a poem, students will create gestures and percussive dance phrases that translate the poem into movement. Through a variety of structured tasks, such as translating: the rhythm of a line into body perucssion or an image from the poem into full body movement, then combining gesture and sounds; creating locomotor moves and pathways based on a poem's structure; creating gestures based on the emotions the poem spurs students find new entry points into understanding poetic devices and comprehending complex poetry. By informally showing the phrases created, students are given the opportunity to see how their peers interpret and understand a poem through the movement and sonic phrases they create. Students will be able to engage with the poem from a variety of perspectives as well as noticing their peers' perspectives. By sharing the phrases they create, they will be able to recognize different perspectives. [Social Emotional E1 1.c.] This program is best suited for students in grades 6-12.
Program Artist:
ABREPASO