Join us for a fascinating conversation with Woodacre resident and award-winning coreographer Alex Ketley, whose lastest work RESILIENCE about death row inmate Bill Clark has been garning incredible reviews from coast to coast. I saw this performance in April of 2025 and was profoundly moved. It was an extraordinarily dynamic, emotional, poetic and viscerally charged experience, beautifully performed. I would call it an essential work for our times.

Alex Ketley is an independent choreographer, filmmaker, and the director of The Foundry (a vehicle to explore the intersection of dance with mixed-media art, installation, and contemporary ways of devising performance). Formerly a classical dancer with the San Francisco Ballet and LINES Ballet, Alex left dancing professionally to create The Foundry as a platform to explore his interests in alternative methods of devising performance. The company has allowed Ketley the freedom to pursue projects that would be difficult to realize within his commissioning career. A few examples of these are: Syntax, an hour long duet systemically using the mechanics of language as an organizing mechanism; Lost Line researched how the application of environment affects the generation of movement and studied in direct response to California's diverse physical landscapes; the No Hero Trilogy which was a multi-year project that explored what dance and performance means to the lives of people living throughout rural America, and Distal Imprint a film created in collaboration with artist and Death-Row inmate Bill Clark. Which we will talk about. . .

Alex has received numerous awards for his work including a Gerbode-Hewlett Choreographer Award, the Eben Demarest Award, the National Choreographic Initiative Residency, and a National Guggenheim Fellowship. Alex is an Advanced Lecturer at Stanford University.