MANCC Welcomes Returning Choreographic Fellow and Bessie Award Winner, Beth Gill

January 18 – 31, 2016

Beth Gill

Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill will return to MANCC to work on Untitled, which is a new site-specific performance installation inspired by archetype, the imagination and the subconscious. A symbiotic pair with a mysterious and ever-present bond, a lone heroic female and a glowing, otherworldly presence inhabit a dreamlike, sensory-rich world that draws the audience into an immersive act of witnessing. Gill hopes to create an intimate, surrealist space building on the formalism of her past several works (Electric Midwife, New Work for the Desert), while forging new psychologically driven terrain through explorations of role, the gathering and layering of meaning and being, and ultimately, disappearance.

Gill’s first residency at MANCC (December 2013) was a concentrated research process for New Work for the Desert, in which Gill worked with the full cast and explored sound design with Jon Moniaci. New Work for the Desert went on to premiere at New York Live Arts in March 2014. In October of 2014, Gill returned to MANCC to work with AXIS Dance Company to create phrases, playing with the idea of movement as a natural response to the “here” and “now.”

While in residence for Untitled Gill will focus on movement creation as well as work with collaborator Jon Moniaci on the development of an original sound score.

Her new work will premiere at The Chocolate Factory in May 2016.

Collaborators in residence: Christiana Axelsen, Jennifer Lafferty, Heather Lang, Marilyn Maywald, Kayvon Pourazar, Stuart Singer [performers], Jon Moniaci [sound designer] and Claudia LaRocco, [Hatchery Project Documentor/Evaluator]. Slideshow photos by Chris Cameron and Al Hall.

Biography

Beth Gill working with AXIS dance company

Beth Gill is an emerging choreographer who makes contemporary dance and performance in New York City. She has accumulated a body of work that critically examines issues relating to the fields of contemporary dance and performance studies, through a focused exploration of aesthetics and perception. Ranging from short-term improvised structures to long-term choreographed performances, her work has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop and New York Live Arts as well as performed internationally.

Beth is a 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship recipient, a New York City Center Choreography Fellow for 2012-2013, and a member of the inaugural cohort The Hatchery Project (2013-2015) including: Luciana Achugar, Paul Lazar & Annie B. Parsons, Reggie Wilson, Jennifer Calienes (MANCC), Sara Coffey (Vermont Performance Lab), Craig Peterson (Live Arts Brewery), Brian Rogers & Sheila Lewandowski (The Chocolate Factory Theater).

In 2011 she was awarded two New York State Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and the Juried Award for the choreographer exhibiting some of the most interesting and exciting ideas happening in dance in New York City today. Dance Magazine named her one of the top 25 artists to watch and Time Out New York called her work, Electric Midwife, one of the best dances of the year.

Gill is one of seven choreographers profiled in Michael Blackwood’s documentary New York Dance: States of Performance, which continues the focus of his two highly regarded previous documentaries: Making Dances: Seven Post-Modern Choreographers (1980) & Retracing Steps: American Dance Since Postmodernism (1988). Her work will soon be part of the growing catalog of dance online presented through On The Boards TV.

Beth is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has been a guest artist at Barnard College, Eugene Lang College the New School for Liberal Arts and Arizona State University.

Collaborators

Performers

• Jennifer Lafferty
• Heather Lang
• Marilyn Maywald
• Stuart Singer

Sound Designer

• Jon Moniaci

Entrypoints

Entrypoints are unique opportunities for visiting artists to conduct research and collaborate with the FSU and Tallahassee communities as well as the national dance field.

January 21, 2016
Curated Focus Group
Gill will host a curated informal focus group of invited scholars and community members.

Please reserve a seat or email info@mancc.org for additional information.

The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), at the FSU School of Dance, is a choreographic research and development center whose mission is to raise the value of the creative process in dance.