Chris Schlichting
(MN)
2017
- Chris Schlichting is a Minnesota-based choreographer, performer and dance enthusiast who believes in a flexible definition of dance. His choreography expresses itself as a tensile inclusion of dichotomies. Relying on the formality of structural investigation and the emotion of earnest expression, his dances evoke the grandiosity of spectacle and the delicacy of intimate moments. Schlichting develops dances outside the constraints of thematic and conceptual frameworks, allowing the choreographic process to develop focus through physical intuition and sensory awareness.
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Schlichting was named Best Choreographer in 2013 by Minneapolis-St. Paul City Pages for his work Matching Drapes, which also received two Sage Awards, including one for “Best Performance” and one for “Best Design”. He is a 2015 McKnight Choreography Fellow, administered by The Cowles Center and funded by the McKnight Foundation, and the first recipient of the American Dance Institute’s (Rockville, MD) Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography, a project that provides commissioning funds, fiscal sponsorship, developmental and production support for a new work from one U.S. based choreographer every year. Schlichting’s 2015 work Stripe Tease was named a “Top dance of 2015” by the Star Tribune.
Schlichting has been presented by venues throughout Minnesota, including the Walker Art Center, the Cowles Center, The Southern Theater, the Bryant Lake Bowl, the Red Eye Theater and many more; in New York at Danspace Project and as a frequent contributor to CATCH! performance series; the American Dance Institute in Rockville, MD; Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, IA; ODC in San Francisco, CA; Velocity in Seattle, WA; Fusebox Festival in Austin,TX; the Storefront Theater (Chicago, IL).
Schlichting’s work has been commissioned by Danspace Project at St. Marks (by Tere O’Connor for Food for Thought, twice by Judy Hussie-Taylor), James Sewell Ballet (Ballet Works Project), the Walker Art Center (three, including The Momentum Series, the 25th Anniversary Sculpture Garden Celebration, and for Stripe Tease, which premiered in the 2014/15 performance season), Carleton College, The Southern Theater, Young Dance, and Zenon Dance Company.
Period
Visiting Artist | February 15 – March 2, 2017
Collaborators in Residence: Tristan Koepke, Laura Selle Virtucio, Maggie Zepp [dancers], Holly Bass [writer]
Chris Schlichting came to MANCC as a Visiting Artist for his first residency to begin work on his project, Period. In this work, Schlichting is furthering his practice of weaving together ideas from complex and disparate cultural source material. His exploration looks at how common language can emerge from generative processes that share time and space, and challenge conventional ideas of disciplinary boundaries.
For Period, Schlichting began his work with gentle, small-scale studies of meditative entry from stillness to action, as a response to the political aftermath of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. From an interest in mindful creative processes that uncover opportunities for disruption and acts of resistance, Schlichting is investigating how abstract contemporary forms can be situated in ways that respond to contemporary forces of destruction.
During the residency, Schlichting met with FSU scholars and Tallahassee community members to open dialogue on the ideas in his work and invite new perspectives to inspire, shape, and challenge his creative process. These scholars included Dr. Jeannine Murray-Román, Professor of French and Spanish specializing in comparative Caribbean literatures and cultures; Dr. William Butler, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning; Dr. Andrew Frank, an ethno-historian specializing in the history of the Florida Seminoles; Summer Hill Seven, a public intellectual/artist; Dr. Hannah Schwadron, Professor of Dance History; and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women and FSU’s 2011 Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor.
A work-in-progress showing was held on February 22, 2017, as a part of the School of Dance’s weekly Forum.
This residency was funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts.
