Claire Hancock

CO-FOUNDER & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Claire Hancock is a choreographer, dancer and interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the intersection of abstract forms and narratives. Many of her original works tell old stories in new ways through conventional and unconventional venues, immersive audience experiences, and on film/new media. 

She holds a Master of Arts degree in European Dance Theatre from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, England, and earned both a Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degree in dance from the University of Arizona. Claire danced professionally with ODC/San Francisco and River North Dance Company in Chicago. Additional featured solo performances include those with Broadway veterans Ben Vereen and Liz Callaway. Her professional career is underpinned by the somatics education she received through the Joseph and Clara Pilates’ “Body Contrology” system, via the lineage of Ron Fletcher. She has been a Nationally Certified Pilates Teacher and Qualified Fletcher Pilates® teacher since 2010.

Hancock has been a guest teacher and choreographer for organizations including the Limón Institute, Broadway Theatre Project, San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, University of Arizona School of Dance, Arizona Theatre Company, Arizona Opera, Tucson Symphony Orchestra, True Concord: Voices and Orchestra, The Rogue Theatre, The Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre, and Broadway in Tucson. She has served as rehearsal assistant for Ben Stevenson’s Three Preludes and End of Time, as well as George Balanchine’s Serenade and The Four Temperaments, reporting to Leslie Peck and Elyse Borne, repetiteurs for the Balanchine Trust. Claire is a repetiteur for several of the late choreographer David Berkey’s works including his signature piece, Sentinel, which she has staged for Vassar College in New York, the New Mexico Dance Institute, and the University of Arizona School of Dance.

In 2009, Hancock co-founded and directed Artifact Dance Project in Tucson, AZ with colleague Ashley Bowman, a professional dance company dedicated to dance, live music, and film. The company cultivated over 50 collaborations, premiered over 100 new works, and had two successful tours of Asia. The project opened Artifact Dance Project Studios in Tucson’s warehouse district, which housed the company and provided a full curriculum of dance classes for the community as well as an annual international summer workshop for dance and music collaboration.

Recently Hancock has been developing and creating work with composer Vincent Calianno for a new company, Two Trains, which focuses on producing works for new media and the stage. Their next project, A History of the String Quartet in its Natural Habitat, will premiere in the fall of 2021. Other upcoming projects include L’ASTRONOME, an opera in nine parts, which is currently in progress.

Hancock was recently a guest lecturer with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra’s Young Composers Project, and with Calianno is helping to foster young composers and choreographers in the Tucson community.

For more information, visit clairehancock.com.

Vincent Calianno

CO-FOUNDER & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Inspired by the renegade eloquence of the American vernacular, the music of composer Vincent Calianno “blurs the boundaries between fine art and popular culture” (VICE), through kaleidoscopic colorings, muscular rhythms, extreme stasis and motion, while curiously investigating new musical possibilities through new practices and obsolescent technologies. His musical catalogue for the concert hall, theatre, cinema and new media explores the interplay between live instruments, electronics, and visual media.

Calianno’s music has been commissioned and performed internationally by ensembles including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Thalea String Quartet, JACK Quartet, Nouveau Classical Project, Ensemble Mise-en, Jennifer Koh, John Pickford Richards, Kivie Cahn-Lipman, American Composers Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Iowa State Symphony, New York University Symphony, Artifact Dance Project, and others. 

His awards include the ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize (The Facts and Dreams of the World According to Michael Jackson), the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Award (A History of the String Quartet in its Natural Habitat), the Sarah Award for best new podcast (Voices of the Revolution), the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute (against COLORADO), and the Howard Hanson Prize (Beckett). In addition, he was an Alan Menken Fellow, and Banff Centre Fellow.

New projects include a new miniature for solo violin, Ashliner, for violinist Jennifer Koh and L’Astronome, a large-scale opera for film as part of Two Trains 2020/21 season.  Recent highlights include the Thalea String Quartet premiere of A History of the String Quartet in its Natural Habitat, and A Painted Devil, a new work for dance the Artifact Dance Project.   

In addition to composing for the concert hall, has an active career in scoring for film and new media. His commercial credits include music for Adecco, Morgan Stanley, and AlixPartners advertising campaigns, as well as short and feature-length films, industrials, and dramatic podcasts. His interest in scoring for early cinema has led him to compose new scores for La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (for viola and electronics), and Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari (for low strings).

In 2019, Calianno co-founded Two Trains with choreographer Claire Hancock. Two Trains is a hybrid music-theatre-dance project focused on abstract and inventive storytelling through the combined expressions of imagery and sound. Their next project, A History of the String Quartet in its Natural Habitat, will premiere in the fall of 2021. Other upcoming projects include L’ASTRONOME, an opera in nine parts, which is currently in progress.

Calianno holds degrees in composition from Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Eastman School of Music, University of Illinois, and New York University. His teachers have included Livingston Gearhart, John Luther Adams, Lewis Nielson, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Zack Browning, and Mark Suozzo.

For more information visit droplid.com.