Louise Runyon Performance Company, an Atlanta multidisciplinary performance company, was founded in 1989. Based in modern dance, for 20 years we produced annual concerts which frequently included dance, poetry, theatre, puppetry and music. Atlanta venues have included 7 Stages, Beacon Hill Arts Center and The Beam. In addition to annual productions, we have performed our work at local and national venues including the Arts Festival of Atlanta, Center for Puppetry Arts, Decatur Arts Festival, Kingfest, Nexus Contemporary Art Center, the Cleveland (OH) Performance Art Festival, and many universities around the southeast and the nation. We have been funded by Poets & Writers Inc.; Georgia Council for the Arts; the (GA) Governor's Discretionary Fund; City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs; Fulton County (GA) Arts Council; DeKalb County GA Office of Arts, Culture and Entertainment; and by numerous individuals and corporations. Louise Runyon Performance Company has in more recent years focused on presenting poetry.

We have created and presented work that is collaborative, multi-disciplinary, and developed through improvisational exploration. We have been committed to presenting multiple disciplines including dance, theatre, poetry, music and puppetry. We are concerned thematically with questions of empowerment and the human spirit; women's experience; the environment and the natural world; and issues of relationship, connection and community.

Words and movement have been of particular interest to us: combining the two in different ways as well as presenting single-discipline works. Contact Improvisation (CI) is the dance genre that has fueled much of our work. CI involves two partners maintaining contact of body surfaces while rolling, lifting and giving weight; the beauty of CI is in the effortless conversation of two connected bodies in motion. About listening, collaboration and communication, it echoes our thematic interests in community, relationship and connection.

Artistic Director Louise Runyon graduated from Oberlin College in 1970 at the age of 19 with a degree in Theatre Arts and English. Her artistic work has been influenced most deeply by Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater in New York, the legendary experimental theatre group with whom she apprenticed in 1969, and by Leslie Uhl and The Dance Unit in Atlanta, who watered and nurtured the New York seeds. Runyon has toured her one-woman shows, Finding Home and Crones, Dolls and Raging Beauties, throughout the Southeast and the nation, often through university women's studies departments. She produced her first book of poems, Reborn, in 2004, followed by LANDSCAPE / Fear & Love in 2007, The Clearing in 2011, The Passion of Older Women in 2018, and Where Is Our Prague Spring? in 2022.

Since 1989 we have worked with 35 artists including dancers, musicians, poets, puppeteers and jugglers. Collaborating artists have included dancer/choreographers Lori Teague, Lynn Hesse and D. Patton White; and poets Alice Lovelace, Thrower Starr, and Robert Brown.

All Contents Copyright 2022 by Louise Runyon