Natasha Adorlee is an Emmy Award-winning choreographer, filmmaker, composer, and educator in San Francisco, CA. A first-generation Asian American woman, Natasha began choreographing in 2014 while maintaining an award-winning dance career with Robert Moses’ Kin, ODC/Dance, Kate Weare and Co., and The San Francisco Symphony. After winning over ten international awards for her acclaimed short film Take Your Time in 2018, she became a sought-after filmmaker, choreographer, and composer. Most recently, she was commissioned to create for Joffrey Ballet’s Winning Works, Kansas City Ballet, BalletX, Ceprodac (Mexico), Kawaguchi Ballet (Japan), Ballare Carmel, Ballet22, and Amy Seiwert’s Imagery. Natasha has also created original work for Pixar Animation Studios, Oculus, National Geographic, and New Yorker Magazine, and she founded Concept o4 to create multimedia dance-based experiences advocating for more accessibility to the arts. Awarded an NEA Grant, Dresher Fellowship, and Jacob’s Pillow Choreographic Fellowship, Natasha is pursuing a prolific creation period while sharing her knowledge through Dance on Camera workshops. She is also an Artistic Advisor for Ballet22.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | Training Program
Photography: Natasha Adorlee | © Rob Suguitan
Carmen Rozestraten is a founding member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet and danced with the company from 1978-1996. She is a senior faculty member for LINES Ballet’s education programs and teaches the company regularly. A native of Amsterdam, she has toured the world as a performer and educator, teaching at major ballet companies such as Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, Opera de Lyon and Spain’s Compañía Nacional de Danza.
She has choreographed for Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Institut del Teatre, Barcelona, the LINES Ballet Summer Program, the LINES Ballet Training Program, and LINES Ballet BFA at Dominican University of California.
Carmen has also made three award-winning dance films.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | BFA at Dominican, Dance Center, Summer Program, Training Program
Babatunji was born in Portland, Oregon but raised on the Big Island of Hawaii. He received his formal dance training from Center Stage Dance Studio and the University of Hawaii in Hilo before moving to San Francisco to train at the LINES Ballet Training Program on full scholarship. Babatunji has performed works by diverse choreographers such as Sidra Bell, Amanda Miller, Gregory Dawson, and Maurya Kerr. He has performed overseas in Japan and China and danced with Philein/ZiRu productions, Maurya Kerr’s tinypistol, and Dawson|Wallace Dance Project. Babatunji joined LINES Ballet in 2013 and danced with the company for six years. Currently, he is a dancer with Post:Ballet and SFDanceworks in San Francisco. He rejoined LINES Ballet in 2021.
Photography: Alonzo King LINES Ballet | Dancer: Babatunji | © RJ Muna
Debra Rose is the founder and owner of San Francisco GYROTONIC®, primarily created to serve the San Francisco Bay Area’s dance community in 1988. Debra created the first syllabus and GYROTONIC® manual associated with a dance program for the Alonzo King LINES Ballet BFA Program at Dominican University of California. She has also created a unique GYROTONIC® curriculum for the LINES Ballet Training Program, LINES Ballet Summer Program, San Francisco State University, and, most recently, The San Francisco High School of the Arts.
As a dancer, Debra trained in New York at The School of American Ballet, after which she danced with the Oakland and San Francisco Ballets. The majority of her career was spent dancing for the San Francisco Opera Ballet and as a principle and founding member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet. Debra also served as a Ballet Mistress for LINES Ballet and assisted Mr. King in setting choreography on various companies that include Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theater of Harlem, and the Joffrey Ballet.
Sandra Chinn is a ballet teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sandra has faculty and company positions with Alonzo King LINES Ballet, ODC/Dance, Shawl Anderson Dance Center, and Berkeley Ballet Theater, where she has been artistic advisor since 2018. She has been a visiting guest artist for Hollins University MFA Dance program, and is adjunct teacher at New York University Tisch Department of Dance Summer Festival since 2016. She has guest taught for Company Wayne McGregor, Jessica Lang Dance, the dancers of Paul Taylor Dance Company, Abraham.In.Motion, Lucinda Childs Dance, Smuin Ballet, Aszure Barton and Artists, Amy Seiwart’s Imagery, Post:Ballet, SF DanceWorks, Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, and BODYTRAFFIC. She is beloved for her somatically informed pedagogy that draws on Body-Mind Centering, Pilates, Feldenkrais, Franklin Method, Alexander Technique, Iyengar Yoga, GYROTONIC®, and GYROKINESIS®. She received an Isadora Duncan Special Achievement Award for “her commitment to and excellence in the training, teaching, inspiring, and motivating dancers throughout the dance community” for the 2018-19 season.
During her performing career in New York City, she was a company member of Dennis Wayne’s Dancers, Finis Jhung’s Chamber Ballet USA and Bob Bowyer’s American Ballet Comedy. She was featured in the off-Broadway dance show “Funny Feet,” for which she received a Drama Desk Award nomination as “Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical.” She is a graduate of the National Academy of Arts (Champaign, Ill.), and she continued her studies at the Joffrey Ballet School (NY), and intensively with Maggie Black. She is grateful for a performing and teaching career in the concert dance field and she looks forward to continuing her work and studies for many years to come.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | Dance Center, Summer Program, Training Program
Photography | © Nick Korkos
Brett Conway is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and artistic director of SFDanceworks. As a former company dancer of Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theater, Brett has worked with many influential choreographers, including Alonzo King, Jiri Kylian, Paul Lightfoot, Sol Leon, Mats Ek, Crystal Pite, Marco Goecke, and Ohad Naharin. Since 2017, Brett has been on faculty with the LINES Dance Center and LINES Ballet’s education programs.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | BFA at Dominican, Dance Center, Summer Program, TEENS at LINES, Training Program
Photography | © Nick Aitken
Christian Burns has been choreographing, teaching and performing in the Bay Area for 21 years. His pursuit for finding meaning and purpose through dance has yielded a dynamic range of interdisciplinary dance works for stage, video and visual art.
From teaching statement: “By approaching a work from two opposite ends of the spectrum—ballet and improvisation—I allow the mirroring to reveal truths about each that might not be at first apparent. The tension of contrast between the traditional and contemporary approaches has deepened my understanding and appreciation of each of its core principles, and led to a personal philosophy that highly developed training in both will yield more authentic results of pure expression that we strive for in Dance. For me, embracing this duality has been informative not only in dance but a helpful way to approach learning in all areas of life, and something I would like to imbue through my various teachings.”
In the San Francisco Bay Area his work has been presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC Theater, Counter Pulse, The Garage, Headlands Center for the Arts, Z Space Theater, Dancers Group Studio Theater, Shotwell Studio Theater, Howard Street Studio Theater. Beyond, his work has also been presented at The Walker Art Center, Canal Danse in Paris, Taipei Artist Village in Taiwan, Nightingale Theater in Brighton UK, WINLAB Independent Festival in London, Escapade Festival at MovingArtsBase in London, The Dada House in Zurich Switzerland, OT301 in Amsterdam NL, The Southern Theater in MN, as well as performances in numerous independent studio locations in Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Southern France, New York and Western Massachusetts. His dance-video work has been shown at Pacific Film Archive Berkeley Art Museum, Impakt Festival (NL), Dutch National Television (NL), Moving Pictures Festival for Dance on Film and Video in Canada, Roberta Beck Cinema (NY), Santa Fe Art Institute and Stuttgart FilmWinter Festival in Germany.
His commissions include Hope Mohr Dance, The Cambrians, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, James Sewell Ballet, Stanford University, USF, Mt. Holyoke College, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, The Laban Center London, Interlochen Center for the Arts, LINES Ballet BFA at Dominican University and LINES Ballet Training Program. He created over 70 dance pieces for the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance during its fourteen year history between 2004-2018.
Christian has been awarded a 2010 Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME) grant – given by the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, a 2008 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship for Choreography, the 2004 National Choo-San Goh Award for Choreography, the 2001 Paula Citron Award for Choreography for Camera (from the Moving Pictures Festival in Toronto), 1997 McKnight Artist Fellowship and was an artist-in-residence at the Experimental Television Center (NY). Christian is a contributing author for When Men Dance, Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders, Edited by Jennifer Fisher and Anthony Shay, Oxford University Press 2009 and has self published a book chronicling his choreographic process titled Motion and Process: knowing not knowing, ideas on dance 2006-08.
Christian has been a guest artist with The Forsythe Company and was a company member of Alonzo Kings LINES Ballet and James Sewell Ballet. He has been researching and practicing improvisational methods since 1994 and has performed internationally with Improvisers; Kirstie Simson, Katie Duck, Michael Schumacher, Ave Karczag, and Chris Aiken among many others. Christian completed three years of training at The School of American Ballet, working with renowned ballet teacher Stanley Williams.
In 2008 Christian co-founded the interdisciplinary art center Parsons Hall Project Space Holyoke, MA. In 1998 he co-founded The Foundry, an interdisciplinary dance company based in San Francisco. The Foundry received critical and popular acclaim as well as the support of numerous private Foundations, Contemporary Art Centers and Residency programs. In 2002/03 The Foundry were exhibited in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts biannual Bay Area Now3, named by Dance Magazine one of the ‘25 to Watch‘ and the San Francisco Chronicle said, “The Foundry is at the vanguard of American dance.“
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | BFA at Dominican, Summer Program, Training Program
A native of Hutchinson, Kansas, Kara Davis has danced for BalletMet, Atlanta Ballet, Ohio Ballet, the San Francisco Opera Ballet, and Ballet Jorgen in Toronto, Ontario. She is a founding member of KUNST-STOFF and Janice Garrett & Dancers, both of whom she danced for ten years. Since moving to San Francisco in 1996, she has danced for The Foundry, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Robert Moses, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Holly Johnston, Amy Raymond, Pearl Ubungen Dancers & Musicians, and Mary Carbonara. She won an “Izzie” in 2003 for “Outstanding Achievement in Individual Performance” and was San Francisco Chronicle dance critic Rachel Howard’s pick for 2005’s MVP.
Davis has taught at the San Francisco Ballet School, Berkeley Ballet, Atlanta Ballet School, ODC, UC Berkeley, Saint Mary’s College, Stanford University, Mills College, SF State, San Jose State University, Guangdong Modern Dance Academy in Guang Zhou, China and in Cairo, Egypt. She has been a faculty member for LINES Ballet’s education programs since 2005 and co-founded project agora (project-agora.com) with Bliss Kohlmyer in 2006. The company has since presented work at the Bates Dance Festival (Artists in Residence 2015), Edinburgh Fringe Festival, SF International Arts Festival, ODC Theater, Dance Mission, and SPF. As an independent choreographer her work has been selected as a finalist (2009) and runner-up (2012) for ACDA, and has been performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Cowell Theater, and the California Theater (sjDANCEco commission) and the Museum of Performance + Design. Davis has received numerous Isadora Duncan nominations for her choreography and one “Best Choreography” award for Terra Incognita, Revisited, a collaboration with Manuelito Biag, Katie Faulkner, and Alex Ketley.
Davis was an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center For The Arts in 2009 and currently teaches at University of San Francisco. She earned her MFA from Hollins University in 2013.
Alonzo King LINES Ballet | BFA Program, Summer Program, Training Program