Alex Ketley
Choreographer
Alex trained as a dancer at the Washington Ballet, the School of American Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. In 1994 he moved to California to join the San Francisco Ballet where he performed a wide range of classical and contemporary repertory including the work of William Forsythe, James Kudelka, and George Balanchine. In 1998 he left the ballet to co-found The Foundry in order to explore his deepening interests in choreography, improvisation, mixed media work, and collaborative process. In addition to his initital years directing The Foundry, Alex worked for Alonzo King's LINES Ballet as both a dancer and choreographer from 2000-2002. With The Foundry he has created dance, installation, and video pieces during residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (CA), The Yard (MA), ODC Theater (CA), the Santa Fe Art Institute (NM), the Ucross Foundation (WY), and the Taipei Artist Village in Taiwan. Independent of his work with The Foundry, he has been a guest choreographer at North Carolina School for the Arts and Florida State University, and his work has received the National Choo-San Goh Award and the inaugural Princess Grace Award for Choreography, as well as awards from the Hubbard Street 2 National Choreography Competition, and the International Choreographic Competition of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur in Quebec, Canada. In 2001 he began an ongoing relationship with Hubbard Street 2, and has created four pieces for the company to date that have been toured internationally. For 2005 he received funding from the Creative Work Fund and created his first systemic work, Syntax, with California poet Carol Snow, funding from the Irvine Foundation and created Lost Line which explored California's diverse cultural and physical landscape through the use of improvisation and video, and was commissioned from both Jim Vincent for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Robert Moses for his company KIN. In 2006 he was appointed Resident Choreographer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, and also commissioned to create new work for the dance departments at Stanford University and San Francisco State University. In 2007 Ketley worked with the nations leading physically integrated dance company, AXIS, through the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography's "Free to Rep" program in Florida, and was awarded a yearlong CHIME Grant/Residency to mentor with veteran artist Charlie Moulton. He also created a new work for Ballet Met's 30th anniversary program, and premiered a new Foundry project exploring contemporary Iranian poetry in collaboration with The Translation Project's founder Niloufar Talebi.