BILL CRATTY Dancer Bill Cratty was born in Cleveland and studied dance and gymnastics starting at age five, but stopped, according to his mother, because his brothers teased him. He took up dance again though, completing a BFA in dance at Ohio University in 1973 and one year later joining the Jos Lim n Dance Company, where he became a soloist and performed for eight years.

The company would eventually premiere Cratty s The Kitchen Table, which dance critic Walter Terry called a seminal dance work of the 20th century. Cratty left the Lim n company in 1982 to form his own Bill Cratty Dance Theater, which lasted eight years in New York. He perform with and set works on several other companies in New York and elsewhere, including performances with Mikhail Baryshnikov s White Oak Dance Project. Cratty died of liver cancer at age 47 in London in 1998.

The Ohio University School of Dance has since then given the Bill Cratty Scholarship annually to an undergraduate dance major. - MG HALIM EL-DABH Composer Halim El-Dabh may be most familiar to Clevelanders as composer of the Symphony for 100 Drums that opened Ingenuity 2006. He s also a familiar face at percussion festivals around the region, but his greater claim is as one of the best known composers of Arabic descent.

He wrote the orchestral score for a light show at the Pyramids of Giza, which has been performed there each evening since 1961. His main instruments are piano and an Egyptian drum called the darubukha, but El-Dabh was also one of the first to experiment with electronic music, having begun to manipulate sound with wire recorders in Egypt in 1944. We count him as our own because since 1969 he s taught music and African studies at Kent State University.