Laurie van Wieren
(MN)
2022
Laurie Van Wieren grew up on the west side of Chicago where her Swedish and Welsh ancestors landed in 1900. She has been a dance maker, curator and teacher of the Twin Cities community in Minnesota for more than 30 years. Her solo and ensemble choreography has been shown nationally as well as in Germany, and Russia. Van Wieren has curated performance for the Southern Theater, Ritz Theater, Bryant Lake Bowl Theater, and Soo Visual Art Center. She has developed work for the Walker Art Center’s Open Field performance, which highlighted 100 local choreographers. Van Wieren’s 16-year run of the acclaimed 9×22 Dance/Lab, a monthly showcase, was a performance platform for local and visiting choreographers. Her choreography has been a recipient of fellowships & grants from the Jerome Foundation, Bush Foundation, NEA, Rockefeller Foundations, Minnesota State Arts Board, and The McKnight Foundation. Van Wieren has received a Special/Citation Sage Award, a Sage Award for Outstanding Performance, and a City Pages “Artists of the Year” for her solo improvisational dance: Temporary Action Theory. She has been choreographing a series of seasonal site-specific ensemble dances at Silverwood Park since the spring 2016. During the pandemic her work was seen on the Mississippi River and in Silverwood Park under a full moon. Van Wieren’s future work includes a series of improvisational solo’s considering the histories of her ancestors.
Remote Sensing/ Collecting Our Past
Partnership Project | McKnight Artist Fellow: April 6 – 16, 2022
Collaborators in Residence: Kristin Van Loon [Dramaturg/Dancer], Alyssa Baguss [Visual Artist]
Minneapolis-based artist Laurie Van Wieren came to MANCC for the first time to develop her ongoing project, Remote Sensing/ Collecting Our Past, which is an investigation of the interaction between the body and the landscapes in which they exist, historically and in the present moment. Van Wieren, in partnership with her two collaborators, dramaturg/dancer Kristin Van Loon and visual artist Alyssa Baguss, explored migration patterns and layers of movement of the body and the landscape, while striving to pay attention to what each collaborator carries with them in navigating their histories and futures.
While in residence, Van Wieren and her collaborators met with FSU Professor of Art, Kevin Curry, who spoke with them about the possibilities available with mapping software and 3D printing to recreate naturally derived objects such as rocks, twigs, and other parts of a landscape as art objects that reference specific places. Upon Curry’s recommendation, Van Wieren, Van Loon, and Baguss later visited the FSU Art Department’s Fabrication Lab with guidance from Caitlin Driver, and Baguss visited the Innovation Hub at FSU with Dr. Issy Masduki. Both Driver and Dr. Masduki offered possibilities that could be available to Van Wieren and Baguss in creating larger scale maps and art objects to support future set design and visual art embedded in the work. Van Wieren also visited several cemeteries in Tallahassee, including the Oakland Cemetery, where she found the burial site of a distant relative as a part of her continued research into relationships between various lands and her ancestors’ relationships with them.
Van Wieren and her collaborators also co-hosted a Brown Bag Lunch with fellow Minneapolis-based performance collective SuperGroup, attended by FSU School of Dance faculty and students. During this lunch, SuperGroup and Van Wieren spoke about the arts scene in Minneapolis, the support available to the arts community through the McKnight Foundation and other funding entities, and the trends in dance that they have noticed in response to the emergence of the COVID pandemic. Van Wieren also hosted a showing at the end of her residency utilizing large scale print-outs of maps directly relating to each collaborator’s ancestry and large swathes of paper on which Van Loon and Van Wieren created a score delineating relational movement maps.
This residency was supported, in part, by a partnership with McKnight Choreographer Fellowships, funded by The McKnight Foundation and administered by The Cowles Center for Dance & The Performing Arts.
