MANCC Announces Fall Line-up of Nationally Acclaimed Artists in Residence

Alice Sheppard

Housed within FSU’s School of Dance, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) is one of the nation’s only such residency sites for contemporary choreography, offering dance and body-based performance practitioners unparalleled opportunities to hone their craft and develop new works in a creative community. Each year, 10-15 nationally significant artists inhabit the Montgomery Hall studios in one – three week periods, during which they are provided with creative or scholarly resources from within the campus and Tallahassee communities that are aligned with their research. Additionally, MANCC residencies can offer FSU students singular opportunities to engage with some of the field’s leading professionals. The opportunities range from interactive brown bag lunch discussions, informal showings, and panel discussions to interacting one-on-one with artists in mentorship, in-studio observations, and as understudy performers.

Kota Yamazaki

MANCC will host three award-winning artists with unique and diverse practices during the Fall semester. Alice Sheppard (August 25 – September 8) will develop her work, DESCENT, which reimagines Venus and Andromeda as interracial lovers and intends to obliterate assumptions of what dance, beauty, and disability can be in an evening-length duet atop a giant ramp installation. A public work-in-progress showing will take place Tuesday, September 5th at 6:30pm in Montgomery Hall’s Black Box Studio. Kota Yamazaki (November 9 – 22) will explore a world of darkness as he comes to MANCC to develop Part II of his Darkness Odyssey trilogy, which takes inspiration from French philosophy, Butoh, and Japanese Goze music. David Neumann (November 25 – December 3 and returning in June 2018) returns to MANCC to continue work on Because Science, a multi-disciplinary dance/theater piece that ponders the unfathomable scales of the universe and investigates hegemony, masculinity, and race in relation to art-making and science.

In addition, Jumatatu Poe will come to MANCC for a 2.5 day site visit October 3 – 5 to prepare for his spring 2018 residency with choreographer and J-Sette performer Jermone “Donte” Beacham, where they will be creating a new dance work, Let ‘im Move You: This is a Formation. J-Sette is a dance form with origins in southern drill teams made popular in the African American club scene.

Jumatatu Poe

David Neumann

Each of these artists this fall will also bring one to two writers in addition to their other collaborators as part of MANCC’s pilot Embedded Writers Initiative, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This initiative is designed to support the re-imagining of dance writing conventions in order to better respond to and engage with a wider range of ever-evolving contemporary forms.

Please visit and subscribe to the mailing list at mancc.org for updates as details are finalized on  more public work-in-progress showings as the season continues to unfold. Spring season 2018 will be announced in a later CFA newsletter.

Fall 2017