Allison Shir

Allison Shir is a dance artist originally from the East Coast and currently based in Salt Lake City.  Prior to relocating to this Pretty Great State, she lived in Holland and Israel where she co-founded, performed, and created for both the interdisciplinary performance group CorpComposition (Amsterdam/Den Haag) and the Ouroboros Dance Collective (Tel Aviv).  She also was a performing member with the Israeli-based Aluminum Show on domestic and international tours.  Locally, she has danced and made work with Tumbleweeds Dance Theatre and DanceBand BandDance, and has been a performing member with Dance Balletti and And Artists.  She continues to create new work and perform in freelance projects as an independent artist.  Lastly, she loves DEXO, watermelons, and her cat.

Amy Freitas

Amy Freitas started accidentally improvising dance during high school recitals and has been practicing the form since.

Amy loves playing with the balance of structure and freedom within groups of artists to create performance pieces that feel expressive to everyone involved.

Carly Schaub

Carly Schaub is originally from Benson, UT and graduated with an M.F.A. in Modern Dance from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and a B.F.A. in Theatre and Dance, from the University of Wyoming. She has performed in numerous dance and musical theatre productions, studied many dance forms, including Baroque and Renaissance dance, addition to spending time studying in London.  She has worked with many choreographers including Bill Evans, Peter Pucci, Yoav Kaddar, Keith Saunders, Patricia Tate, Marsha Knight, Thomas Shoemaker, and Netta Yerushalmy to name a few.

Prior to attending graduate school Carly worked with Northern Plains Ballet, in Bismarck, ND, serving as Education Coordinator as well as teaching Ballet, Modern Dance, choreographing, and performing in their season. She also taught and performed as a guest artist around the ND, MN areas including Grand Forks, Jamestown, and Fargo/Moorhead. Her favorite role she performed was “Lise” in La Fille Mal Gardée, with North Dakota Ballet. She choreographed numerous musicals for Bismarck State College, and Sleepy Hollow Summer Theatre, and some of her favorites were Mary Poppins, Chicago, Cabaret, and Urinetown.

Carly’s research while at the University of Utah encompassed dance technique theory and practice, and Dance for Parkinson’s Disease. She has also continued historical dance research and reconstruction on her own spending several summers at the International Baroque Institute at Longy, Boston. Carly currently wanders as a guest artist in a variety of places, runs an early Ballet group called Dance Balletti in Salt Lake City, teaches Ballet and Modern on the staff of Wasatch Arts Center, costumes small dance productions, and teaches Dance for Parkinson’s in partnership with the University of Utah and Repertory Dance Theatre.

Emmett Wilson

Emmett Wilson is a dance artist, choreographer and director for DEXO. Born and raised in Houston, Emmett moved west to complete a BFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah, minoring in Environmental Studies and Portuguese. Emmett’s involvement with DEXO began when they performed a dancing migraine in The Heavenly City (2015). They have since choreographed and directed Red Lake (2016), and is excited for future DEXO productions.

Emmett also jams with the improvisational dance and music ensemble, Porridge for Goldilocks, and has a solo performance project, LadyPrince is Yung&Bizzy. Wilson’s work has been presented at the The Barn (Houston), 12 Minutes Max (SLC), Mudson (SLC), Speakers Corner (SLC), Dumke Blackbox Theater (SLC), Jupiter XI Apparel (Chicago), and The Pilot on Navigation (Houston). Their writing can be found published in loveDANCEmore and 15 Bytes. Emmett is thrilled to choreograph in an operatic context in which various artistic languages simultaneously speak: making nonsense and creating meaning.

Jasmine Stack

Originally from Phoenix, Arizona, Jasmine Stack is a movement and visual artist whose heart never left the desert.  In her dance work she investigates relationships between societies and their surrounding environments, using movement to physicalize individual and communal experiences of these natural and constructed landscapes.

 Her current research as an MFA candidate at the University of Utah presents dance as a stimulus for conversation surrounding issues of environmental sustainability and social justice in Northern Arizona.

Jasmine has presented her dance research at the Reach UR Life Northern Arizona Suicide Prevention Conference (2015, 2016) in Flagstaff, Arizona, and has exhibited original choreography in venues including the Phoenix Center for the Arts, Herberger Theater, Beta Dance Festival, and American College Dance Festival.  In addition to her own choreographic work, she has performed with the Deseret Experimental Opera Company and VERVE Dance Company, and has worked with both local and national dance artists including Eric Handman, Mariah Maloney, and Amy O’Neal. Her DEXO premiere was dancing Ian in Red Lake.
Jasmine lives, studies, and creates in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Meagan Bertelsen

Meagan Bertelsen is a movement artist based in Salt Lake City. A 2016 graduate from the University of Utah, she has a BFA in Modern Dance and an Honors Degree with a thesis in solo improvisation. Alongside her personal research, she has been a longtime member of Porridge for Goldilocks, a group of performance improvisers of various disciplines. For her, collaborating across mediums is a challenge of the relevancy and abilities of her craft.

Joining forces with DEXO for Red Lake was a dream come true. Meagan has danced in other intersectional works including Porridge’s Wood In Nails, an evening-length commission, The Mists, a site-specific dance theater across Red Butte Gardens, and her curatorial debut, The Museum of Nobody. Her stage performances include choreography by Scott Wells and Steve Koester, as well as independently produced shows by peers Dat Nguyen, Natalie Gotter, and Erica MacLean. She is currently working with an all-woman cast on Dollhouse, an immersive evening of dance throughout a local historical home.