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jess pretty is on a quest for pleasure that transcends time and the spaces she claims to reside in. her practices include writing, teaching, cooking, singing, conjuring, and dancing. pretty received an MFA in Dance with a minor in Queer Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. she has shown her work at the Chocolate Factory Theater, La Mama Experimental Theater Club (2017 La Mama Moves Festival), New York Live Arts (as a 2016/17 Fresh Tracks artist), CATCH!, Gibney Dance Center, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, the CURRENT SESSIONS, panoply performing arts space, Green Street Studios, and three ACDA conferences. pretty has been an artist in residence at Kent State (2017), the Chocolate Factory Theatre, and the Center for Performance Research (2019-2020) and was a 2020 member of the Queer Art Fellowship. pretty has collaborated and been a part of the works of: Will Rawls, Claudia Rankine, Kevin Beasley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Peter Born, Catherine Gallasso, David Thomson, Katie Workum, Niall Jones, Jennifer Monson, Cynthia Oliver, Leslie Cuyjet and Dianne McIntyre. pretty is the current steward of AUNTS; a punk/DIY performance series that hosts events/festivals/shows to highlight the works of experimental dance makers in NYC and beyond. pretty currently lives in Minneapolis, MN where she is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Jess's Website The Walker Art Center i'm curating this year's Choreorapher's Evening Reverence for Impulse Is an unscripted and unplanned podcast with me, Weena Pauly-Tarr and my brother Tim Pauly, both working in the worlds of somatics: exploring bodies and all they hold/do/feel. We start each guest encounter with a few minutes of meeting each other without words, through the language of our bodies, before we press record and bring it to a conversation. This is not a hard hitting agenda or getting to the bottom of things. It's about finding each other in the not-knowing. We're here for the spaciousness, the awkwardness, the silliness, the silence — from the dark insides of our bodies to the bright insights of our minds, we're excited to welcome people who's impulses we'd like to get to know. Intro Music by Annie Hart Weena's Website: weenapauly.com Weena's IG: @weenapaulytarr Tim's Website: intheserviceoflife.com Tim's IG: @in.the.service.of.life
jess pretty is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and the current artistic director of AUNTS; a punk/DIY performance series that hosts events/festivals/shows to highlight the works of experimental dance makers in NYC. she has shown her work at La Mama Experimental Theater Club (2017 La Mama Moves Festival), New York Live Arts (as a 2016/17 Fresh Tracks artist), CATCH!, Gibney Dance Center, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, the CURRENT SESSIONS, panoply performing arts space, Green Street Studios, three ACDA conferences, and the Chocolate Factory Theatre. pretty has been an artist in residence at Kent State (2017), the Chocolate Factory Theatre, and the Center for Performance Research (2019-2020) and was also a 2020 member of the Queer Art Fellowship. pretty has collaborated and been a part of the works of: Will Rawls, Claudia Rankine, Kevin Beasley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Peter Born, Catherine Gallasso, David Thomson, Katie Workum, Niall Jones, Jennifer Monson, Cynthia Oliver, Leslie Cuyjet and Dianne McIntyre. call and response is a methodology for building connection and community; a celebration and appreciation for black life; an archival tool; and lens for embodiment. this work is personal and archival; calling on me to turn towards my own story, lineage and memory as the site of choreographic creation. in looking at myself, i aim to build a black queer archive to provide proof of life (instead of the constant images of black death we experience) for future generations. how do we come together? how do we see each other? how do we care for each other? how do we make space for pleasure, joy, ease and non-urgency? how do we 'get free' using the body as the site for radical transformation? taking place somewhere between an improvised self portrait and the middle of the dance floor, call and response directs our attention inward to the deep histories our bodies hold. calling us to say ‘yes' to "the encounter”, to vulnerability, to the collective, to the moving body, to change and to transformation.
This episode is also available as a blog post: https://thecitylife.org/2022/11/01/nai-ni-chen-dance-company-announces-free-master-class-contemporary-polish-dance-for-professional-dancers-with-jacek-luminski-november-8-2022-gibney-dance-center/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/citylifeorg/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/citylifeorg/support
Miguel Gutierrez lives in Brooklyn, NY. He creates dance based performances, music and poetry. His work has been presented at Centre National de Danse/Pantin, Centre Pompidou, Kampnagel, ImPulsTanz, Philly Live Arts, Walker Art Center, TBA/PICA, MCA Chicago, ICA Boston, New York Live Arts, Live Arts Bard, AMERICAN REALNESS, the 2014 Whitney Biennial and many other festivals and venues. He has received support from Creative Capital, MAP, National Dance Project, Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts and the Tides Foundation. He is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, and award recipient from Foundation for Contemporary Art. He is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist. He has received four New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards. His recent work includes a commission for Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France, called Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us), which was inspired by the events of May 1968 in France. He has created music for several of his works, for choreographer Antonio Ramos, and in collaboration with Colin Self for Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony's Everything Fits In The Room. He has performed as a singer with Anohni, Justin Vivian Bond, Vincent Segal, and Holcombe Waller, has a music duo with Nick Hallett called Nudity in Dance, and he recently launched a project called SADONNA, sad versions of Madonna songs. He invented DEEP AEROBICS and he is a Feldenkrais Method® practitioner. He is the program director for LANDING, a new educational initiative at Gibney Dance Center. His book WHEN YOU RISE UP is available from 53rd State Press. www.miguelgutierrez.org Ishmael Houston-Jones' improvised dance and text work has been performed world-wide. Drawn to collaboration as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels at Danspace Project, an 8-week series of events that interrogated the intersection of dance makers from the African Diaspora with the aesthetics of Post-modern choreography. In 2016 he co-curated, with Will Rawls, Platform 2016: Lost and Found – Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now that queried the effects that the loss of a generation of artists to AIDS has had on current dance creation. As an author Ishmael Houston-Jones' writing has been anthologized in several books, recently in Saturation – Race, Art and the Circulation of Value, (2020) and Writers Who Love Too Much – New Narrative 1977 – 1997, (2017). Houston-Jones' first book FAT and Other Stories was published in 2018 The recipient of four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards, Houston-Jones' work has received support from: The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, 2018; The Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts, 2016; The Doris Duke Charitable Trust, 2015; and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 2013. Ishmael Houston-Jones is an adjunct professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts' Experimental Theater Wing and a master lecturer at The University of the Arts (Philadelphia) School of Dance. www.batesdancefestival.org
We spoke to Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington and Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt about conflict among collaborators, authenticity, dance as revolution, boundaries, political art-making and more. Here’s one of our favorite moments from our conversation.Like all our conversations, this segment is unfiltered. This episode contains explicit language and mature content, so listen at your discretion as we aim to fully form mindful ideas and language.Baye & Asa is a company creating movement art projects directed by Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington & Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt. They have presented at Mark Morris Dance Center, Dixon Place, Gibney Dance Center, and many more. Amadi is a full time performer in Punchdrunk's NYC production of Sleep No More, and Sam is currently on a world tour with Akram Khan Company.Follow Baye & Asa @bayeandasaBecome a Patron of the podcast for as little as $5/mo: https://www.patreon.com/formapodcastFollow us on social @formpodcastTheme song by Warp Trio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Danté Brown is a New York artist and Artistic Director of Warehouse Dance, a collaborative group that generates compelling thematic environments within a process of physical and theoretical inquiry. While Brown was in residence with the Emory Dance program in 2016, he sat down to talk about creativity with Blake Beckham, a choreographer, producer and dance educator in Atlanta. Brown began his dance training at Wesleyan University, which led him to The Ohio State University to receive his MFA in choreography and performance. As a performer, Danté has worked with artists such as Esther Baker-Tarpaga, Christal Brown, David Dorfman, Kendra Portier, and Noa Zuk, among others. As an educator, Danté has had the opportunity to teach a range of classes at Bates College, Dancewave, Dance New Amsterdam, East Village Dance Project, Gibney Dance Center, Mark Morris Dance Center, Peridance Capezio Center, and The Ohio State University. This podcast episode is introduced by Laura Briggs (Emory dance and chemistry alum/Arts at Emory intern) and Maggie Beker (Creativity Conversations host and producer). Watch the original video recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz4wiWzqqww&list=PLCAC61A4AB786C00E&index=23&t=0s Follow us! Facebook Instagram
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a Nigerian American poet, curator, and performance artist originally from Detroit, MI. He is a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 NEFA National Dance Project Award recipient, a 2018-20 New York Live Arts Live Feed Artist-in-Residence, a 2019 Gibney DiP Artist-in-Residence, a 2017 Jerome Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Abrons Arts Center, a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow, a 2016 Gibney Dance boo-koo resident artist, and a recipient of a 2016 USArtists International Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. His previous work #negrophobia (premiered September 2015, Gibney Dance Center) was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award and has toured throughout Europe having appeared in major festivals including Moving in November (Finland), TakeMeSomewhere (UK), SICK! (UK), Tanz im August (Berlin), Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival (Norway), Zurich MOVES! (Switzerland), Beursschouwburg (Belgium) and Spielart Festival (Munich). His current work, Séancers, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in December 2017 and has toured nationally and internationally to critical acclaim. Recent highlights include Mousonturm (Frankfurt, DE), FringeArts (Philadelphia, PA), Sophiensaele (Berlin, DE), and the Wexner Center (Columbus, OH). In 2019, Séancers will have engagements at the Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX) and Montréal Arts Interculturels (Montréal, CA), among others.American performance venues include: Abrons Arts Center, Joyce SoHo, DTW, FringeArts, Dixon Place, Dance Theater Workshop, Bennington College, Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, the CEC Meeting House Theater, Wexner Center for the Arts, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, LAX Festival, Miami Theater Center, Art Basel Miami, and the Painted Bride Arts Center, among others.He was a Co-Curator of the 2015 Movement Research Spring Festival and the 2015 Dancing While Black performance series at BAAD in the Bronx; a contributing correspondent for Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), and Critical Correspondence (NYC); a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; a 2011 Fellow as a part of the DeVos Institute of Art Management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University where he earned his MA in Curatorial Studies.His work in performance is rooted in a creative mission to push history forward through writing and art making and advocacy. Kosoko’s work in live performance has received support from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through Dance Advance, The Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, The Joyce Theater Foundation, and The Philadelphia Cultural Fund. His breakout solo performance work entitled other.explicit.body. premiered at Harlem Stage in April 2012 and went on to tour nationally. As a performer, Kosoko has created original roles in the performance works of Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, and Headlong Dance Theater, among others. In addition, creative consultant and/or performer credits include: Terry Creach, Lisa Kraus, Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, Leah Stein Dance Company, Emergent Improvisation Ensemble, and Faustin Linyekula and Les Studios Kabako (The Democratic Republic of Congo).Kosoko’s poems can be found in such publications as The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, and Silo. In 2009, he published he chapbook, Animal in Cyberspace, and, in 2011, he published his own collection, Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit (Old City Publishing). Publications include: The American Poetry Review, The Dunes Review, The Interlochen Review, The Broad Street Review, Silo Literary and Visual Arts Magazine.Kosoko has served on numerous curatorial and funding panels including the Brooklyn Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Baker Artists Awards, among others. In 2014, Kosoko joined the Board of Directors for Dance/USA, the national service organization for dance professionals. He is also a founding advisory board member for the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving.He has held producing and curatorial positions at New York Live Arts, 651 Arts, and The Watermill Center among others. He continues to guest teach, speak, and lecture internationally.
November 7, 2017 Collaborators Pramila Vasudevan and Piotr Szyhalski, invite artists, Salome Asega and Jill Sigman, to participate in a facilitated dialogue about the responsiveness of artistic practice to pressing sociopolitical and ecological concerns of our time. Through artist-led presentations that will detail a range of interdisciplinary strategies, this Studies Project will share how arts practitioners are making political interventions while challenging formal expectations around legibility, site-specificity, and linearity. This event took place on November 7, 2017 IN PARTNERSHIP Movement Research works in partnership with local, national, and international organizations to create opportunities that spur interaction and exchange among choreographers and movement based artists through residencies, workshop exchanges, informal showings, and discussions. Pramila Vasudevan’s NYC Residency is made possible by the McKnight Choreographer Fellowship Program, administered by the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts and funded by The McKnight Foundation, in partnership with Gibney Dance Center, The Playground, and Movement Research. Pramila Vasudevan is a 2016 McKnight Choreographer Fellow. Studies Project is an artist-curated series of panel discussions, performances, and/or other formats that focus on provocative and timely issues of aesthetics and philosophy in the intersection of dance and social politics, confronting and instigated by the dance and performance community. For more information on Movement Research please visit www.movementresearch.org
Eva Yaa Asantewaa (2017 Bessie Award winner for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance) is a writer, curator and community educator. Since 1976, she has contributed writing on dance to Dance Magazine, The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, Gay City News, The Dance Enthusiast, Time Out New York and other publications and interviewed dance artists and advocates as host of two podcasts, Body and Soul and Serious Moonlight. She blogs on the arts, with dance as a specialty, for InfiniteBody and served as Editor in Chief of Dancer's Turn, a blog devoted to longform profiles of dance artists, created by students of her "Writing on Dance" workshop series at New York Live Arts. Ms. Yaa Asantewaa joined the curatorial team for Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost and Found and created the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, featuring 21 Black women and gender-nonconforming performers for an evening of group improvisation. Her cast was awarded a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. As EYA Projects, she has begun partnerships with organizations such as Gibney Dance Center, Abrons Arts Center, Dance/NYC, BAX and Dancing While Black to curate and facilitate Long Table conversations on topics of concern in the dance/performance community. She was a member of the inaugural faculty of Montclair State University’s MFA in Dance program. She has also served on the faculty for New England Foundation for the Arts' Regional Dance Development Initiative Dance Lab 2016 for emerging Chicago-area dance artists. In May 2017, she served on the faculty for the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography's inaugural Moving Forward Dialogues Dance Lab for Emerging Choreographers. Ms. Yaa Asantewaa served as a member of the New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards committee for three years and as a consultant or panelist for numerous arts funding or awards organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. A native New Yorker of Black Caribbean heritage, Eva makes her home in the East Village with her wife, Deborah, and cat, Crystal. https://infinitebody.blogspot.com
An interview with NYC-based dance artist Alexandra Beller. Alexandra is a former member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and is Artistic Director of Alexandra Beller/dances. She is currently on faculty at Gibney Dance Center and is Associate Professor at Long Island University.
This is a Movement Research Studies Project: New Models for Presenting Dance in the 21st Century February 4, 2014 at Gibney Dance Center 890 Broadway with panelists Travis Chamberlain from the New Museum, Brian Rogers from the Chocolate Factory, Sally Silvers from Roulette, and Lucien Zayan from The Invisible Dog. New Models for Presenting Dance discussed the dynamic shift the landscape of dance presentation in NYC has undergone over the last five years. New spaces for showing work have opened, museums and galleries are regularly programming performance, and several venues that present multiple artistic genres have become specifically interested in presenting dance. This conversation with a sampling of voices from these venues created a layered portrait of the constantly shifting field of dance presentation, while examining its new directions.
This is a Movement Research Studies Project: FOR WHAT Moderated by Ursula Eagly with panelists Morgan Bassichis, Justine Lynch, Melanie Maar, Clarinda Mac Low, Alta Starr and Marýa Wethers December 2, 2014 at Gibney Dance Center 890 Broadway as part of the Movement Research Festival Fall 2014: MATTERING co-curated by Rebecca Brooks and Daria Faïn in conversation with Shelley Senter FOR WHAT was a discussion led by panelists who enjoy multi-faceted engagement with the cultural field, including healing elements, social justice aspects, performance activations, and various cultural considerations. The discussion was a response to the observation that many artists decide to be of service in some way to the culture and to others and addresses questions such as what are we doing, and what are we doing it for? What does it mean to live/work as an artist at this current time, and how do we position our work in relation to everything else in our lives and our environment? And in what way are our artistic practices necessary to a collective transformation of society? Studies Project is a series of artist-instigated panel discussions, roundtables, performances and/or other formats that engage issues of aesthetics, philosophy and social politics relevant to the dance and performance community.
This is a Movement Research Studies Project: The Role of Class in Current Dance Practices Conceived in conversation with Movement Research Faculty January 20, 2015 at Gibney Dance Center 890 Broadway organized by Movement Research in collaboration with Beth Gill, Lance Gries, Eva Karczag and Gwen Welliver The Role of Class was a series of brief and intimate discussions with various teaching artists including Julian Barnett, Michelle Boulé, Wendell Cooper, Jeanine Durning, Barbara Forbes, Zvi Gotheiner, K.J. Holmes, John Jasperse, Joanna Kotze, Nia Love, Juliette Mapp, Cori Olinghouse, Janet Panetta, Shelley Senter, Vicky Shick, RoseAnne Spradlin, Karinne Keithley Syers and Jesse Zarrit. These discussions addressed questions and ideas about dance and movement-based class through their own practices and histories. After the discussions attendants were invited to actively participate in smaller group conversations with the opportunity to share insights and proposals. Photo: Morning exercises on the roof of Itten College, 1931, from "Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and later" by Johannes Itten
This is Movement Research Studies Project: Dance and Music Now With Panelists: Douglas Dunn & Steven Taylor, Melanie Maar & Kenta Nagai, Edisa Weeks & Katie Down October 7, 2014 at Gibney Dance Center 890 Broadway proposed and moderated by Philip Ellis Foster Musicians and dancers have a long and storied relationship with one another, from traditional forms that wed music and dance to narrative storytelling, to orchestral ballets, and on to Cage and Cunningham collaborations. This evening explored the multifaceted ways artists are addressing this relationship today, with a focus on musicians that perform live with dancers and movement-based performance work. Artists discussed and examined their various dynamic approaches to collaboration between and across these fields. Photo: Kenta Nagai and Melanie Maar by Ian Douglas
Movement Research Studies Project: We Came To This City To Shit On A Stage Adrienne Truscott With Panelists: Sara Beesley of Joe's Pub, Eric Dyer of Radiohole, Vallejo Gantner of PS122, performer/choreographer/curator Colin Self, and choreographer/performer Gillian Walsh. Gibney Dance Center, December 3, 2013 as part of the Movement Research Festival Fall 2013 “Le Song, Ya?!” curated by Adrienne Truscott and Jibz Cameron aka Dynasty Handbag The conversation revolved around the following question: "How do we make, define, and notice 'transgressive' art in a city whose identity, economy and landscape are increasingly manicured, welcoming, mainstream, highly visible and inaccessible?"