The Artist
What you’ll want to know…
The Artist
Under the leadership of choreographer and Artistic Director Matina Phillips, alight dance theater creates modern dance and theatrical performance events that celebrate the power of story and inspire others to be compassionate viewer-participants both at event time and later on in their communities. It achieves this goal by creating and choreographing original short- and evening length pieces drawing upon the imagination, passion and striking talent of a select, dynamic community of collaborative performing artists.
The result? Performance events that inspire audiences of all ages and walks of life.
Alight’s hallmark is, in fact, that creativity essential for producing visually-striking, emotionally-resonant performance events that captivate audiences both inside and well beyond the conventional theater environment.
Matina Phillips
The Artistry
Alight’s signature artistic specialty employs multiple elements of theater, including dance, physical theater, live music, designed sound score, theatrical lighting and often spoken text. Creating a complete world unique to each piece is central to alight’s focus on original creative process, elements that are always communicated to alight’s audiences.
Alight’s creative energy, tenacity, and true grit surely reflects the leadership of its founder, Angella Foster, and of the two keenly-inspired performing artists and mentors who have followed in her footsteps: Matina Phillips, Artistic Director, and Phillp’s long-time collaborator, Eleni Grove, Associate Artistic Director.
Phillips has been a dance instructor in the area for the past 7 years teaching at various studios and schools, including Dance Place and Metropolitan Ballet Theatre, and recently became a core faculty member with the Joy of Motion Dance Center.
She earned her BFA in Dance Performance & Choreography from Elon University. After choreographing for several years with creative partner Eleni Grove, Phillips was appointed Artistic Director of alight in July 2016. The pair have continued their collaboration ever since.
With a remarkable education reaching to sociology and anthropology, Eleni Grove has performed with and choreographed for regional companies including alight itself, Contradiction Dance, Taffety Punk Theatre Company, and Astro Pop Events.
Phillips and Grove have a years-long record creating dance work collaboratively. They are now imagine-ering new opportunities for alight that are already raising the visibility of modern and contemporary dance successfully
- By incorporating artistic themes that are often so common that we overlook them, even though they are essential for describing and commenting on the human condition.
- By conducting performances in settings both expected and unexpected — the latter being thematically-enhancing and highly-accessible to non-traditional audiences.
Most recently, alight choreography and full-length dance work has been co-presented by Dance Place in October 2016, at the 2017 Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival, and at the Baltimore Dance Invitational in February 2017. Alight resident choreographers have also been featured at The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, earlier Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festivals, the Source Festival, Dance Place, the Greenbelt Museum, Old Greenbelt Theater, Velocity DC, the Mead Center for American Theater, and the Bowie Center for the Performing Arts
Excerpts from Alight’s Performance of “Page 115”
