Isa's profile

Isa Leal  is a performing artist and somatic researcher. She holds a B.A. in Theatre and Dance from James Madison University (2006). She was recently honored for her work by her acceptance into UC Davis’ Performance Studies Group, a program that supports a handful of individual artists in the development of the their ongoing personal performance research toward a doctoral degree, beginning fall of 2018.

Her work is primarily about engaging people in empathy through shared visceral experiences. Isa has worked with movement and dance modalities that promote self reflection for over a decade, specifically Contact Improvisation and Authentic Movement. In performances she intends the deconstruction of the audience-performer hierarchy by inviting the audience to make choices that directly affect the choreography of actions. As they witness the perception of the story that arrives in their mind's eye they are also made aware of the perspective of the group.

Isa has taught dance improvisation across the U.S. and Mexico in workshops and university settings. She has also performed with audiences towards social change in her solo tour “Experiments!’.

Isa  has facilitated various large scale immersive events as an organizer and/or director, including ‘In Watermelon Sugar’ for Fields Festival, ‘Flatland’ for the Annex theatre, and “Visible: An Incidental Symphony” for Transmodern Festival. In 2016  she was invited to  be a core organizer for the  “Let the Eat Cake Walk” Transmodern Festival . She has also worked to develop audience engagement by working as an organizer for Akimbo Dance and Movement Art Festival and developing an interactive 3D puzzle, collected on a “Dance Hunt,” for the 18 curated dance companies.

Nationally, she was selected as an Artist in Residence for SEEDS: Somatic Experiments in Earth Dance and Science 2016, while internationally she has been recognized as a leading somatic and performance researcher as a member of Figure Space, a group selected by Steve Paxton (Merce Cunningham, Judson Dance Theatre) and Lisa Nelson. Her residencies with Figure Space have afforded her the privilege of performing, studying, and co-inventing  with living legends in the field of somatic research. She is currently developing a Mindful Movement Curriculum and Score for Kennedy Krieger’s Center for Neurodevelopmental and Imaging Research and her performance methodology, Dialoguing the Unconscious.

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