“If I wanted to become a choreographer, I would go study with Randee Paufve. She creates good movement. She layers her material until everything fits together like an elaborate puzzle. She works with superb dancers and draws out distinct personalities.”
Rita Feliciano, The San Francisco Bay Guardian
Randee’s classes are rigorously crafted, offering a hybrid of modern/contemporary and performance techniques, sprinkled with a little 1970s jazz. Each class starts with a thorough warmup, followed by short progressions across the floor, culminating in longer combinations set to fun music selected to teach musicality and phrasing. Dancey choreography for dancers of all levels, ages, and abilities.
Check back for updates on January 2025 classes at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, Bandaloop Studios, and other locations TBA.
Teaching Bio
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Randee grew up in the rural northeast, and received her early dance training from Robert Christopher, Helene Yelverton, Saga Ambegaokar, Susanna Newman, Santo Giglio, Jim Payton, and the flora and fauna of the ancient northeastern mountains, woods, streams, rivers. She graduated from Elmira College Magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a self-designed BA in Cross-Cultural Performing Arts. She spent her junior year in India, studying Tamil language, folk dance and the martial art Silambam. Randee holds an MA in Dance Choreography and Performance from the SUNY Brockport and an MFA in Dramatic Arts from the University of California, Davis. She is also a Pilates instructor, trained by Madeline Black and Beth Harris, certified by the Physicalmind Institute.
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A popular Bay Area teacher, Randee has taught workshops and master classes for organizations including SF Dancer’s Group, Axis Dance and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and has trained professional dancers for over three decades through her dance classes at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley.
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Randee has served on the faculties of University of California at Davis, Reed College, Lewis & Clark College, University of San Francisco, California State University East Bay, St. Mary’s College of California, and California State University Sacramento.
Randee has been commissioned to create works for University of San Francisco, Elmira College, Lewis & Clark College, Reed College, Saint Mary’s College of California, and commissioned works have been selected for performance at several regional American College Dance Festivals, and the Dance America/Pacific Festival. A commission for the Saint Mary’s College Dance Company was selected for the gala performance during the 2003 Southwest Regional ACDF.
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Randee began her teaching career directing dance programs at San Francisco’s Saint Rose Academy and the Athenian School in Danville, CA. From 2008-2024 she was head of the dance program at Marin Academy High School in San Rafael, CA, and has been a guest teaching artist at Berkeley High School, The College Preparatory School in Oakland, CA, and the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics in WA state. Randee has received commissions from Shawl-Anderson Youth Ensemble, and from San Francisco School of the Arts, where she collaborated with visual artist Ruth Asawa on a work for the SOTA performing ensemble. Randee is the creative force behind the Bay Area High School Dance Festival, an annual conference gathering dancers from area high school and pre-professional dance companies for a day of master classes, showcases, networking and discussions.
Pedagogy
I teach from the perspective that movement is intentional and unassailable, space is emotional, and bodies are the message.
I invite dancers to inhabit space as a place of vulnerability, intimacy, where diversity in all forms can live and breathe, treating human movement as possibility.
I teach movement that neither transcends nor denies the complexity of being human.
I teach from the belief that movement has its own intelligence, a wisdom we know through feeling, and that all bodies possess this deep knowing.
I teach as a celebration of how we live in our bodies, allowing movement to reveal the vitality of every self.
I teach dance as an ever-evolving expression of body and culture.
I teach who is in the room, from this body, in this moment, in this place, with these people, treating physical presence as essential, sacred, and irreplaceable, and valuing dance as critical to our evolution.