Staff Biographies
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Dance Mistress Alisa Dodson has been dancing since 1980 and calling since 1990. Her first experience was in English Country dancing, but she's added morris, longsword and English clog over the years. Alisa lived in the Bay Area until 1999, and after some perambulating around the country has settled with her husband Allen in Hatfield, Massachusetts. Alisa now calls ECD in Amherst, and has been on staff at Mendocino and Pinewoods. She is currently finishing her final term as Secretary of the Country Dance and Song Society Board |
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Music: Rebecca King is a versatile dance pianist whose strong classical training and love of jazz shows in her rhythmic and lyric piano accompaniments. She can be heard playing English and contra dance in the greater San Francisco Bay Area and the North Bay, mainly with the bands Flashpoint and Luceo. By day, she teaches music in the Sonoma Valley schools. She can also be heard on Cowboy Dancing by Ray Bierl, and on BACDS' recent music CD Swinging On The Gate in which she was also executive producer. |
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Shira Kammen, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, has spent well over half her life exploring the worlds of early and traditional music. A member for many years of the early music Ensembles Alcatraz and Project Ars Nova, and Medieval Strings, she has also worked with the Oregon, California and San Francisco Shakespeare Festivals, and is the founder of Class V Music, an ensemble dedicated to performance on river rafting trips. She performs now with a medieval ensemble, Fortune's Wheel: a new music group, Ephemeros; an eclectic ethnic band, Panacea; as well as frequent collaborations with performers and in theatrical and dance productions. She has played on several television and movie soundtracks, including 'O', a modern high school-setting of Othello. The strangest place Shira has played is in the elephant pit of the Jerusalem Zoo. More at shirakammen.com |
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Jim Oakden started playing piano and clarinet at an early age and stumbled into early music from the classical music scene. After six years performing early music, he discovered the world of traditional and ethnic music. Having diverse tastes, he has played in many bands and performs on an absurd number of instruments, including accordion, mandolin, several styles of bagpipe, recorders, whistle and zurna (to name a few). A dancer himself, he specializes in playing for dancers in a bunch of bands for ECD, contra, morris, Irish, Breton/French, Greek, Bulgarian. He has been on staff at myriad dance camps throughout the country. |
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Danny Carnahan, originally a classically-trained cellist, helped pave the way for the California Celtic explosion of the early ‘80s with the ground-breaking Celtic duo Caswell Carnahan. With Chris Caswell and Robin Petrie, he toured for over 15 years, building a following from Europe to New Zealand, recording 7 albums, and earning two NAIRD "Indie" awards and a Grammy nomination. Since 2000 Danny has been performing and recording with the acoustic septet Wake the Dead, billed as "the world's only Celtic all-star Grateful Dead jam band." Danny is equally at home on cello, violin, octave mandolin and guitar. His first musical murder mystery, "A Jig Before Dying", was published in February and is available (along with 7 CD titles) through www.dannycarnahan.com. |
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Sound: Nick Cuccia is highly regarded by dancers, callers, and musicians for the attention that he pays to the needs of those on and off the stage. Nick is the house sound engineer for the San Francisco, Berkeley, and Sonoma contra dances and the Berkeley experienced English dance. His credits as lead or assistant sound engineer include numerous BACDS events and camps. |