MANCC is excited to support so many artists and their collaborators in residency during the 2023-2024 season. Photo by Chris Cameron

The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) is delighted to continue to welcome both new and returning artists for its 2023-2024 season.

Miguel Gutierrez. Photo by Chloe Cusimano.

Returning Choreographic Fellow, Miguel Gutierrez, who is based in Los Angeles and New York City, kicked off the start of the 2023-2024 Season with his Archive Residency, alongside first-time MANCC archivist Kristen Juarez. Together they reviewed documentation in MANCC’s archive of Gutierrez’s previous five MANCC residencies between 2006 and 2015 (each supporting the development of new work, four works in total that have since toured to major venues in the U.S. and internationally). Juarez is an archivist and senior research specialist for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Their work together helped seed the planning for his second residency, to include his ensemble of five performers, in Fall 2024.

Following Gutierrez, MANCC welcomed re:Frame, a collective of visiting artists, all coming to MANCC for the first time to each further develop their own individual solo works at various stages of development. Visiting Artists Ann Glaviano, Meryl Zaytoun Murman, Ryuta Iwashita, Jeremy Guyton (FSU MFA, 2022), and Shannon Stewart make up the re:FRAME collective, which was originally based in New Orleans. They have continued to co-examine and process their collective organizing towards uplifting and sustaining dance-making in New Orleans and the Gulf South. While at MANCC, re:FRAME continued to look to choreographic research as a vehicle to reframe their sense of perception, modes of being, and co-existing, believing in the potency and promise of a radical reimagining of what dance includes and how dance can be funded, developed, and shared.

Photo provided by re:FRAME

Photo provided by Jung

In the Spring 2024 season, kick-starting the new semester, Los Angeles-based Visiting Artist DaEun Jung has come to MANCC for the first time as a Lead Artist to prepare her evening-length dance project, NORRI (놀이), for national tour. Inspired by the principle, form and mode of Korean folk dance as a communal performance practice, NORRI (놀이), meaning “play” in Korean, creates an inclusive platform to experiment with collaborative pattern compositions while celebrating both collective accomplishments and individual grooves. Her collaborators include dancers, composer, Pansori singer, and a technical director. Jung, a 2017 MANCC Forward Dialogues participant, was selected from that emerging artist cohort to be offered a full residency, supported by the Mellon Foundation. Angeles-based Embedded Writer Ajani Brannum also joined Jung’s residency.

Following Jung, Visiting and Living Legacy Artist Sara Shelton Mann and her longtime collaborator, Jesse Zarritt, have come to MANCC to further develop their body of work, Moving Alchemy. Long an important pioneer of new dance on the west coast, Mann’s improvisational explorations are informed by her distinct and specialized set of methodologies that investigate how training and performance converge into technique or how techniques and training converge and converse with performance. Mann and Zarritt, through their studio practice and workshop offerings, will also be working on a book that aims to make her pedagogic philosophy, in development over her 60-year career as a choreographer, performer and teacher, more widely accessible.

Visiting and Living Legacy Artist Sara Shelton Mann and her longtime collaborator, Jesse Zarritt, have come to MANCC to further develop their body of work, Moving Alchemy. Photo by Robbie Sweeny

Photo provided by Valencia

First-time Visiting Artist Mariana Valencia, based in New York City, will come to MANCC to further develop her latest project Arrival. As an improvisation work that surrenders to the unwitnessable through openness and freedom, Arrival is a practice of presence rather than production and projection. Additionally, multidisciplinary artist and musician Jazzy Ronnero, based in Los Angeles, will collaborate with Valencia in the development of Arrival. The work in development will be shown in 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC and then premiere at ODC, San Francisco.

Following Valencia is NAKA Dance Theater, based in San Francisco and Mexico. NAKA’s two co-artistic directors will be coming to MANCC for the first time in a one-week site-visit to prepare for their Fall 2024 residency, where they will collaborate on the newest iteration of their work, Dismantling Tactic X. This work, which is a continuation of NAKA’s previous Dismantling experiments and development, supports a vision to develop methods of inquiry used during their time together to fuel a cathartic, game-changing conversation around privilege, supremacy, economics, and race.

NAKA Photo by Scott Tsuchitani

Returning Choreographic Fellow Yanira Castro, based in New York City, will come back to MANCC, with support from the Mellon Foundation, with her Puerto Rico-based collaborator nibia pastrana santiago artist, writer Alejandra Martorell, and a group of to-be-announced artist/scholars to convene la convivencia, a three-day artist-fueled, intergenerational exchange of movement-based performing artists. la convivencia will be a time for these artists, who self-identify as Puertorriqueñxs, having ancestry in the archipelago and living in Puerto Rico (Borikén) or in los Estados Unidos (Turtle Island), to congregate, support one another, share practices, and grapple with making work inside the U.S. and Puerto Rico through exchange, scoring, improvising, and dancing, intermixed with meals and conversations.

MANCC will hold its third MANCC Forward Dialogues Emerging Artist Laboratory in Summer 2024, again with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. These MANCC Forward Dialogues are designed to support and catalyze the ideas of emergent movement-based artists from around the country by providing access to a stimulating environment that encourages experimentation and exploration in a facilitated process-oriented laboratory setting. While MANCC primarily has served professional artists, from mid-career to living legacy, since its founding in 2004, this initiative aids in developing relationships with the next generation of dance makers by learning about and supporting their evolving artistic practices.

These artists and their collaborators reflect a range of artistic practices from around the United States, and MANCC is proud to be able to encourage their exploratory growth and creative processes. In addition to and in relationship with this season’s residencies, MANCC will be supporting further writings on dance through its Embedded Writer and Commissioning Publications Programs, supported by the Mellon Foundation.