L e r a l e e W h i t t l e / F O R C E S
Leralee Whittle’s dances for stage & video explore tensions between pervasive social forces and the creative forces essential to each individual dance. She applies textural threading to her choreographic process, a technique she devised from performing both improvisation and diverse styles of choreography over two decades. Whittle spent fifteen years dancing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her most influential and long term collaboration with Nita Little led to the development of her own in-between-process-and-product-aesthetic.
Her work has been presented in California, Oregon, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and in Barcelona, Spain. Before settling in Minneapolis, she lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle with composer/collaborator/husband Paul Sprawl for six years, touring, teaching workshops and creating at residencies.
Leralee Whittle / F O R C E S has been the recipient of grants from Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County, Santa Cruz, CA (2007), Theatre Bay Area, San Francisco, CA (2008), Andy Warhol Visual Arts Foundation, Charlotte Street Foundation and Spencer Museum, Kansas City, MO (2010), Puffin Foundation, New Jersey (2011), a one year performance residency at Urban Culture Project, Kansas City, MO (2011), and was commissioned for STRANGER FRIEND by Charlotte Street Foundation (2012).
This year Displacement Activity premiered in Minneapolis at The Twin Cities / Montreal Choreographic Exchange. We Just Stopped Pretending, a video and performance work with international dancers is currently in the works.