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Home » News » MANCC Looks Ahead to Spring Residency Line-Up

MANCC Looks Ahead to Spring Residency Line-Up

Published January 4, 2018
Living Legacy Artist Ralph Lemon (center) in dialogue with his collaborators during his 2010 MANCC residency for How Can You Stay All Day and Not Go Anywhere?

Living Legacy Artist Ralph Lemon (center) in dialogue with his collaborators during his 2010 MANCC residency for How Can You Stay All Day and Not Go Anywhere?

Housed within FSU’s School of Dance, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) is one of the nation’s only 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 dance studios in one to three week periods, during which they also are provided with creative or scholarly resources from within the campus and Tallahassee communities that are aligned with their research.

Having supported three artistic projects and one site visit this fall semester, MANCC now looks forward to supporting eight more diverse projects this Spring.

MANCC’s spring semester includes residencies for legacy artists, Ralph Lemon and Ann Carlson (NYC; Santa Monica), solo practitioner, Jeanine Durning (NYC), as well as new projects by Juliana F. May (NYC), Rosie Herrera (Miami), Rosy Simas (Minneapolis), Jumatatu Poe (Philadelphia), and collaborative duo Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener (NYC).

Engaging in an exploration of the disparate lineages within their particular dance heritages, Mitchell and Riener will bring lauded critic, author, and performer Claudia La Rocco (NYC/Oakland) into their project, Desire Lines: translation, who approaches the creation of context around contemporary performance as its own artistic practice.

Poe, who came to MANCC for a 2.5 day site visit in October to prepare for his spring residency, will return in March with collaborator and J-Sette performer Jermone “Donte” Beacham, to create a new dance work, Let ‘im Move You: This is a Formation. Exploring J-Sette vocabulary, a form with origins in southern drill teams made popular in the African American club scene, Poe will continue his engagement with FAMU’s Diamond Dance Team.

While exploring distinctly different paths, Durning and May will both incorporate the use of language into performance. Durning‘s solo work dark matter, selfish portrait will look at self-portraiture in the history of art to explore notions of selfhood and the role of individualism in society. May’s ensemble work, Repulsion, will center on the white female body as both victim and perpetrator of sexual trauma and violence through “white neutrality.”

Living Legacy Artist Ann Carlson in rehearsal for Dumbo Redacted during her 2016 MANCC residency.

Living Legacy Artist Ann Carlson in rehearsal for Dumbo Redacted during her 2016 MANCC residency.

Herrera will develop an evening-length dance theater work, Make Believe, exploring magic, celebrity worship, and romantic love through the lens of ritual and religious spectacle. Native contemporary artist Simas will create Weave, an immersive experience of story, dance, moving image, and sound to share and honor individual histories while posing critical questions regarding her relationship to Native communities, non-Native audiences, and creating dance in western contexts.

Lemon and Carlson both return to MANCC to expand and recontextualize ongoing projects. Lemon will develop Saturnalia (working title) with choreographer/dancer Darrell Jones as a new work evolving out of his previous work, 4walls. Carlson will continue her work with dramaturg Melanie Joseph on Dumbo Redacted, a solo that continues her celebrated Animal series, and is inspired by the movement and mythology of earth’s largest land mammal, the elephant.

With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MANCC’s Embedded Writers Initiative 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. This Spring, MANCC will provide support for eight writers in residence to re-imagine dance writing conventions as they engage with a wide range of ever-evolving contemporary forms of dance and performance.

MANCC residencies 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. Opportunities to engage with MANCC artists will be announced via email. Sign up to receive MANCC’s newsletter at http://mancc.org.

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.