Elisa Reed
Elisa Marie Reed of Phoenix graduated from Arizona State University with her MFA in Dance in May 2020 and holds a BFA in Dance from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. She has worked as performer and teaching artist in Seattle, Chicago, Indianapolis and New Orleans and is an Adjunct Professor at Scottsdale Community College. Over the past decade she has choreographed over 30 works produced around Phoenix. Some of her recent performances have been with Scorpius Dance Theatre, Halo Movement Collective, Liliana Gomez, Mary Fitzgerald, Halley Willcox and Nicole Olson. She has had the privilege of performing numerous times in England and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Her training encompasses a wide range of forms. Her first experiences with dance were in a “non traditional” urban setting. In other words, she would go to raves and dance her heart out. The form that began her journey of dance was waving. Her training in a collegiate setting began with hip hop and breakdancing. This led her to modern dance as well as ballet and jazz. Over the years she has trained in several methods, forms and aesthetics. In the modern/contemporary realm she has studied Graham, Lewitzky, Cunningham, Taylor, Skinner Release Technique, Counter Technique and Limon. In African diasporic forms, she has studied Capoeira, Hip-hop, Jazz, Tap, Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian. In ballet she has studied, Royal Academy of Ballet, Cecchetti and the School of American Ballet. In the realm of somatics, she has studied the Alexander Technique, BodyMind Centering, Ideokinesis, Laban Movement Analysis and the Bartenieff Fundamentals. In improvisational structures, she has studied from several teachers that include task based or image based improvisational structures as well as Gaga movement language.
She began studying aerial dance in 2010 and has since trained with Nicole Crist, Gavin Sisson and MoNika El performing featured aerial roles in Scorpius Dance Theatre and her own work. The amalgamation of all of these influences can be found in her aesthetic. Her work is described as captivating, nuanced, dynamic and rigorous.
