Flying Foot Forum is a vibrant and bold percussive dance/theater company that fuses percussion and percussive dances with many other forms of music, dance and theater, telling unusual tales, creating a wild variety of characters, and exploring universal ideas in inventive and exciting new ways.

Joe Chvala has spent most of his adult life based in New York City, Gothenburg, Sweden, and Minneapolis. He has worked as a director, choreographer, writer, composer, performer, and teacher for opera companies, experimental and traditional theatres, concert dance venues, performing arts academies, and universities.

His work, noted for its breadth and its singular brand of creativity, is inspired and informed by his unique combination of artistic skills and experiences. The range of his work has earned him such diverse titles as "Fred Astaire on acid" and "the Agnes de Mille of tap."

After moving to the Twin Cities in 1990, Joe worked with a variety of theater companies while developing his own choreographic dance/theater work for his company of percussive dancers, the Flying Foot Forum. Since the premiere of their first full concert (May '93), the Flying Foot Forum has been presented in a variety of venues around the world from Paris to New York City, Jacob's Pillow to England.

Joe has received numerous choreographic and interdisciplinary fellowships and grants from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Dance Project, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, Intermedia Arts Minnesota and the Minnesota Dance Alliance, as well as Ivey and Sage Awards for dance and theater.


FLYING FEET - THE PERCUSSION PROJECT
A unique collection of works by collaborators Joe Chvala, Karla Grotting, Peter O'Gorman and guest artist Mary Ellen Childs. Rhythmically complex and compelling, the program highlights the skills of Chvala, Grotting and O'Gorman as they beat out their own intricate, breathtaking accompaniment while executing elaborate dances to brain-dizzying perfection.

The instruments employed are sometimes intricate and elaborate, sometimes simple and elegant, sometimes hand held, struck or swung while dancing, and sometimes nothing but the performers own bodies. The interplay of light, instruments, movement and sound creates a dynamic evening that honors the broad, grand genre of percussion.

In this evening of musical and visual delight, the collaborators pool their artistic inclinations in a work that is more intimate than most Flying Foot Forum shows, paring down to three performers, in a sleek elegant, bare-bones style. Flying Feet adds to the ever expanding definition of percussive dance. It's a perfect chamber concert for presenters and a dynamic, engaging, virtuosic evening for audiences.  


DANCE THAT MAKES MUSIC
The quintessential Flying Foot Forum workshop, Dance That Makes Music synthesizes dance, drumming and music. In this workshop, we create a fusion of improvisational energy that is unpredictably creative through a set of loosely structured improvisations. A unique creation of Joe Chvala and the Flying Foot Forum, this workshop creates a new form of folk dance and music in the life of a community while at the same time teaching skills essential to the creation of percussive dance pieces.