MANCC Opens its 2021-2022 Season with a Full Fall Line-up of Artist Residencies

Joanna Kotze in video still for Nothing’s changed except for everything, a dance film produced with support from MANCC. Photo by Chris Cameron.

The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) welcomes several new and returning artists to the first half of its 2021-2022 season.

MANCC had planned to host Urban Bush Women Partnership Fellow nia love (NY), an FSU School of Dance MFA Alum, who is developing g1(host):lostatsea, her serial, iterative, and interdisciplinary performance and installation work steeped in reconciling the remnants of the Middle Passage as they make their way across generations. She was to begin her residency at St. George Island, filming with her collaborators, ending at MANCC’s black box theater for in -studio work, including the review of her St. George film footage. We are excited to host her rescheduled residency in Spring 2022.

Living Legacy Artist Ronald K. Brown (NY) also was to come to MANCC, in partnership with the School of Dance, at the beginning of the fall semester with his acclaimed company, EVIDENCE, to develop The Equality of Night and Day. Mr. Brown’s work examines concepts of balance, equity, and fairness, considering the conflicting present-day issues that young people, women, and people of color now face in a world where exploitation, gentrification, racism, and xenophobia are increasingly foregrounded. We are rescheduling his residency for late spring 2022.

Milka Djordjevich’s collaborators engage in a rehearsal. Photo by Chris Cameron.

First Nations Performing Arts Network Partnership Fellow, Maura García (OK, unenrolled Cherokee/Mattamuskeet) will come to MANCC for a site visit ahead of her Spring 2022 residency to develop Ꮟ ᎠᏂᏬᏂ They Are Still Talking. García will use this visit with MANCC Artist Emily Johnson to build relationships with the local Indigenous community. Ꮟ ᎠᏂᏬᏂ They Are Still Talking explores ancestral messages through the lens of Cherokee language and traditional teachings about two-spirit people and women.

Returning Choreographic Fellow Will Rawls (NY) will build upon his work, [siccer], a title that plays on the editorial word used to designate a misspelled word, usually in the context of a primary source text. Rawls spent his first residency working with collaborators to put together a stop motion video, asking questions about how the black body is contextualized in images in media and where movement can disintegrate the fixity of those meanings.

Returning Choreographic Fellow Milka Djordjevich (NY) will continue work on CORPS, a project that examines labor and the feminine body across traditional, militaristic, ritual, and folk movement forms. Djordjevich’s 2019 residency was informed through visits with the JROTC at Leon High School and FAMU’s Green and Orange Spring football game, which featured performances by The Marching 100 and FAMU’s Diamond Dancers.

New to MANCC, Benjamin Akio Kimitch (NY) will develop his newest work, currently untitled, that reimagines and challenges commodified East-meets-West stereotypes in dance. Asking how his unique perspective can honor the choreographies, social meaning and artistic developments within non-Western forms for the 21st century, he uses his study of Chinese opera movement as a starting point for challenging perceptions of tradition, reimagining contemporary choreography and de-centering western hierarchies.

Gerald Casel (CA), also a newcomer to MANCC, will prepare to premiere his project Not About Race Dance, titled in reference to Neil Greenberg’s 1994 iconic Not About AIDS Dance. Casel intends to leverage similar strategies to call attention to racial politics in dance at large, and more specifically the proclaimed neutrality of whiteness in postmodern dance.

After a December 2020 residency at MANCC to work on her film Nothing’s changed except for everything produced with support from MANCC’s Media Specialist, Chris Cameron and in collaboration with composer Ryan Seaton, Joanna Kotze (NY) returns to delve back into ‘lectric Eye, an evening-length dance performance choreographed in collaboration with dancers Wendell Gray II, Molly Heller, and Symara Johnson, and composer/performer Ryan Seaton, with lighting design by Kathy Kaufmann. ‘lectric Eye responds to collective and personal loss and isolation and draws attention to the human body’s potential for persistence, resistance, and power. Kotze hopes to work with students at the School of Dance to help develop this work.

Please be sure to read the full project descriptions of each artist on the MANCC website, mancc.org/artists, including additional information on the archive residency program. These residencies are supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts’ Production Residencies for Dance Grant, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation for parent/artists.

Will Rawls engages in conversation with his collaborators. Photo by Chris Cameron.