HISTORY

Janette Hough - Founding Co-Artistic Director (2015-2019)

Janette Hough is a collaborative creator, aerial-dance and physical-theater performer, teaching artist, and choreographer.  She is the Artistic Director of Apparatus Dance Theater, founding co-Artistic Director of AnomalousCo, and former Director of the St. Lawrence Artspace in Reading, PA.

Ms. Hough’s work has received funding and/or residency support from the Barn Arts Collective, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Leeway Foundation. She has choreographed and performed extensively in Portland, ME and Philadelphia, PA where she collaborated with Pig Iron Theatre, Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, Theatre Circ, Valentine Aprile, and Trapezius (company member, 1996-2002), among others. Her choreographic works The Weightless Moment (for Tedx Dirigo), Pale, and Suitor have been performed in various local and national venues. Her current work in progress, Suitor Later, a multimedia, futuristic aerial comedy about body modification and aging, is in development with AnomalousCo.

Choreography

Ms. Hough co-created four productions with AnomalousCo: Harrison Bergeron (pedagogical production, Bowdoin College, 2015), Cabaret Metamorphoses (Circus Center of San Francisco, 2015), Augustine’s Dream (a work in development: Barn Arts Collective Residency, 2015; Cloud City New Works Festival, New York City, 2016), and The Lady in the Tower (pedagogical production, Dixie State University, 2017). In collaboration with Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, she also trained undergraduate theatre students and choreographed aerial sequences for the musical Barnum!, for the Department of Theatre at Dixie State University (2015); and in fall of 2018 returned for a third time to Dixie State to train students and choreograph aerial sequences for a new draft of Augustine’s Dream.

Teaching and making

A teaching artist as well as a performer and choreographer, Janette Hough developed and runs the aerial dance programs for children and adults at the Breakwater School in Portland, ME. She teaches throughout the U.S. at colleges and universities as an independent aerial dance choreographer and aerial yoga instructor, and is a frequent guest instructor at at the theatre departments of the University of Southern Maine and Dixie State University in Utah.

Alexei Syssoyev - Co-Artistic Director (2015-2019)

Alexei Syssoyev has spent over 35 years in the Russian and US theatre as an actor, director, mime and physical theatre specialist, fight choreographer, and teacher. He is a co-Artistic Director of AnomalousCo.

During his years in the former USSR, Mr. Syssoyev was a principal actor of the Ryazan State Drama Theatre, where he played 18 lead roles in 9 years, including Cyrano in a rock-musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, and Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. From 1980-89, he was also Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at the Moscow Institute of Culture (Ryazan campus), where, in addition to teaching courses in acting technique (Stanislavsky’s methods of Active Analysis and Physical Actions), he designed and taught a four-year, comprehensive program of physical expression, including stage movement; classical and contemporary mime; period styles; stage combat, acrobatics, tumbling and stunt work; manual weaponry of Europe and the Far East, from 5th c. BCE to the present; and an advanced course in the direction of stage combat. Concurrently he was Director of Fight Choreography at the Ryazan State Drama Theatre, choreographing fight sequences and coaching actors; and taught advanced courses in stage movement, mime, manual weaponry, fight choreography and aesthetics of stage movement to professionals at the Theatre Laboratory of the Ryazan Theatrical Union.

In 1988 he moved to Moscow to join the Moscow Hermitage Theatre as a lead actor, and in 1989 toured the US and Canada with the Hermitage production of Galich, under the direction of Mikhail Levitin.

After emigrating to America, Mr. Syssoyev choreographed fights and stunt work for the Nora Theatre Company and the Forum Theatre in Boston, the Merrimack in Lowell, and for graduate directing students at the Stanford University Department of Drama, as well as for several university and college productions in Massachusetts. From 1995-1996 he was Instructor of Stage Movement in the Musical Theatre Division of the Boston Conservatory for Music, Dance and Drama. He concurrently taught an ongoing workshop series in the Russian tradition of stage movement at Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre in New York City.

Lauren Hlubny - Founding Member (2015-2019)

Lauren Hlubny is a Brooklyn-based maker of dance-theatre. She is the NYC Artistic Director of the bi-national collective Danse Theatre Surreality (dansetheatresurreality.org)  and a collaborating member of AnomalousCo. Hlubny’s professional directorial debut was at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL—an original 40-minute surrealist dance-theatre work titled DALI. Since then, she has created and mounted experimental works for communities in New York City, Seattle, Boston, Birmingham, Portland (ME), Paris, and Florence. Recent collaborations with AnomalousCo include Cabaret Metamorphoses at the San Francisco Circus Center, in which she participated as a actor-dancer, assistant director, and co-choreographer. Ms. Hlubny’s theatre education spans Stanislavski, Grotowski, and Meyerhold, with a distinct focus on the intersection of movement and storytelling. Ms. Hlubny has an extended background in classical ballet, art history, and anthropological research. These, along with experience in music and circus arts, give Ms. Hlubny a unique and informed hold on conducting creative rehearsals and shaping cohesive productions where people can speak completely different artistic “languages” while pushing the boundaries of contemporary performance and multi-disciplinary art.