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MANCC Announces Spring 2020 Season

Published January 7, 2020

This spring, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) looks forward to welcoming seven regionally and nationally recognized dance artists into residence whose practices and approaches span a wide range. MANCC will also host its first Archival Residency, as well as two site visits as part of partnerships with Urban Bush Women and Global First Nations Performance Network.

As the only choreographic center of its kind that is an integrated component of a Research One University, MANCC, housed within FSU’s School of Dance, offers contemporary choreographers unparalleled opportunities to engage in process-based creative inquiry. Each year, 10-15 regionally and nationally significant artists come into residence for one to three weeks, during which they also receive creative and scholarly support for their research from both the campus and Tallahassee communities, as well as documentation of their creative process, no matter the stage of development. Projects can range from very early-stage research to mid-stage, to just prior to premiere at venues around the U.S. Works being developed this spring season will be on the following national stages: Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), On The Boards (Seattle, WA), Skirball Cultural Center (Los Angeles, CA, in partnership with Bates Dance Festival, Lewiston, ME), Fisher Center at Bard College (Annandale-On-Hudson, NY), River to River Festival (New York, NY), and 651 ARTS (Brooklyn, NY) as part of their inaugural season in their new building.

MANCC’s spring semester includes residencies for Living Legacy artist Pat Graney (Seattle), Urban Bush Women Choreographic Fellow Ananya Chatterjea (Minneapolis), and McKnight Artist Fellow SuperGroup (Minneapolis), as well as new projects by Returning Choreographic Fellow Beth Gill (NYC) and Visiting Artist Netta Yerushalmy (NYC), with mid-stage projects by Visiting Artists Joanna Kotze (NYC) and Edisa Weeks (NYC).

With a pointed focus on the experience of being in the room with individuals, Gill will begin the early stages of her new, currently untitled project. This new work is an opportunity for Gill to extend her choreographic range by bridging spectacle, ritual, physical theater, drama, and sport.

Also in the early stages of a new project, Yerushalmy is working with ‘plucking’ movement vocabulary from various sources and dance forms. She is treating these various pieces of movement material as fabric swatches for an intricate and radical dance and movement quilt.

While vastly different in approaches, Joanna Kotze and SuperGroup both look forward to engaging with questions around memory, perception, and understandings of self and group dynamics. Kotze will further her ongoing project ‘lectric eye, which is a collaboration with composer Ryan Seaton, while collaborative trio SuperGroup will spend their residency looking introspectively at their collaborative practices they have developed over the past ten years, unpacking the implications of how they continue to work together.

Working on the third piece in her House of Mind trilogy, Graney will use her first MANCC residency to further her work ATTIC, which explores sexual assault, suicide, and visions of the afterlife in which the victim imagines both safety and relief. As part of her research, Graney will explore underwater filming towards developing visual projections for this work.

In her commitment to social justice, Urban Bush Women Choreographic Fellow Chatterjea will return to MANCC following her 2019 spring site-visit and fall residency to work on Fires of Lost Homes, which explores journey and migration in today’s political climate, both in the U.S. and India. She will deepen her connections with students through masterclasses and open dialogue around the topic of social justice dance, and continue her community connections that she built during her fall residency with the Florida People’s Advocacy Center.

Also committed to social justice, Edisa Weeks will continue to develop her latest three-part work THREE RITES: Life, Liberty, Happiness, specifically focusing on the Liberty section. While in residence, Weeks plans to visit the Knot House Museum in Tallahassee. She will also host a Roots Party, to which she will invite guests to join her in the journey of making 1,865 roots out of paper and twine. Additionally, she will connect with FSU scholars whose research focuses on American Minstrelsy, Orishas, and depictions of African Americans in the media. The full, three-part work will premiere in Fall 2021 at 651 ARTS.

With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MANCC will continue its Embedded Writers Initiative, which allows artists to invite a writer as scholar, critic, or dramaturg into the creative process as a way of infusing dance writing with perspectives beyond what is evidenced on the public stage. The goal of this initiative is to re-imagine dance writing conventions as they engage with a wide range of ever-evolving contemporary forms of dance and performance.

MANCC residencies also offer FSU students unique 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. Opportunities to engage with MANCC artists will be announced via email. To stay up to date on public Entrypoints, be sure to subscribe to our mailing list at http://mancc.org, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Instagram @mancc_fsu.



MANCC LogoThe 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.