Skip to main content

This is your Donation message.

MANCC to Host Second Iteration of “MANCC Forward Dialogues”

Published April 29, 2019

Photos from 2017 MANCC Forward Dialogues Lab, courtesy of Chris Cameron

In 2017, thanks to generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) piloted its inaugural emerging artist laboratory program, MANCC Forward Dialogues (MFD). Two years later, MANCC is thrilled to welcome another cohort of emerging artists to Tallahassee from August 2-15, again with support from the NEA.

As a vital incubator for new and diverse artistic voices, MANCC created MFD in order to build upon its core residency program, which has, to date, supported 170 regionally/nationally significant artists in residence and over 1,000 collaborators. MFD enables MANCC to identify and invest in an emergent generation of dance-makers working in wide-ranging geographic and cultural contexts, as it services the broader field by uncovering and learning from new research and aesthetic directions by these young makers. As one artist termed this program, “for the field, MFD is a petri dish—a locus where emerging voices/forms can be considered, discussed, fleshed out, experimented with.”

Candidates must be nominated to apply for this competitive opportunity. MANCC solicited these nominations from national colleagues in the dance field, who are familiar with MANCC’s mission to raise the value of the creative process in dance, as well as from past participants. Selection will be based on:

1) A demonstrated commitment to artistic practice

2) A vision for the future of one’s creative practice

3) An openness to collaboration.

As a means of fostering a sense of community and building relationships within and across the dance/performance field, each applicant has been asked to propose one peer to bring with them to MANCC. Collaborators, ranging from the intellectual to the artistic, will include performers, composers, designers, writers, filmmakers, and dramaturgs, who will act as thinking partners to develop ideas at and beyond the MANCC residency.

Photos from 2017 MANCC Forward Dialogues Lab, courtesy of Chris Cameron

Participants will engage in a process-oriented lab that fosters critical thinking through peer-showings, facilitated dialogue, reflective writing, explorations in the studio, and documentation in order to develop, examine, and articulate their nascent choreographic ideas. While at MANCC, each peer cohort will have their own studio space within the School of Dance’s Montgomery Hall, and will have access to MANCC’s unique documentation and research resources.

As in 2017, three acclaimed field-leaders in dance and performance will select the participants and facilitate the laboratory experience: New York City based writer and dance critic Eva Yaa Asantewaa; freelance arts consultant and former longtime Curator of Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Yolanda Cesta Cursach; and choreographer and dance faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin Gesel Mason.

To read more about the 2017 lab and to view photos and video footage, please visit the link below.

MANCC Forward Dialogues is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

More About MANCC Forward Dialogues


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.