Anita Feldman

Anita Feldman, one of a new breed of tap dancers in the early 1980s who expanded the parameters of the art, and one of the earliest to articulate her tap aesthetic, was raised in the suburbs of Chicago. Her mother was an accountant and her father an engineer; both encouraged her to become a mathematician. She began her tap training at age five in Chicago with tap master Jimmy Payne and continued classes with him until she graduated from high school. She also studied ballet and jazz dance, and piano, and learned the rudiments of music theory, becoming attracted to the rhythm section's instruments (bass, drum, and piano) of a jazz combo. When she entered the University of Illinois she studied percussion and African drumming while settling on a major in dance. Modern dance's value as an art form and as a physical outlet was appealing to her, and after graduation she moved to New York where her aesthetic of percussive performance began to evolve. She enrolled in the Dance Education Program of Teacher's College at Columbia University, studying musical composition with Robert Dunn, a John Cage associate who fostered the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s. Dunn exposed her to new methods and tools of choreographic experimentation. Still working in the modern dance mode, her choreography was rhythm-oriented and extremely complex, requiring accurate and technically proficient performers. Feldman's early partner was Carol Hess.

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Lois V Vierk from Lansing, Illinois, in suburban Chicago, was born in 1951. She has spent most of her career in New York City. She has also been active in Europe and Asia, and her music has been presented in Portrait Concerts at German Radio Cologne and in Switzerland.

Among the many performers and presenters who have commissioned her music are pianists Ursula Oppens, Frederic Rzewski, Claudia Rüegg, Margaret Leng Tan, Aki Takahashi, accordionist Guy Klucevsek, the Kronos Quartet, Lincoln Center Festival, Bang on a Can Festival, Ensemble Modern, Music from Japan. Co-creations with tap-dance choreographer Anita Feldman have been performed at major dance and music venues. Modern dance choreographers Elise Monte and Karole Armitage have choreographed new dances to Vierk's music and have presented them recently in concerts in New York City, Chicago and elsewhere. Filmmaker Holly Fisher has spotlighted Vierk’s music in the feature length film Everywhere At Once and in other films.

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