MANCC Welcomes Visiting Artist Chris Schlichting
February 15 – March 2, 2017
The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choregraphy hosts Visiting Artist, Chris Schlichting, for his first residency to work on his latest project, Trimming Macrame (working title), which is in the early stages of development. In this new work, Schlichting will build on his practice of creating intricate and evocative tapestries inspired by complex and layered cultural source material, and playfully merging notions of vernacular and classical forms. Most recently, his work has enlisted collaborators from disparate forms to explore how common language can emerge from generative processes that share time and space, and challenge conventional ideas of disciplinary boundaries. His research continues to focus on creating landscapes that consider the textures and charged histories that live inside sound, objects, movement, and architecture, to present juxtaposing ideas that challenge and support each other.
Trimming Macrame will be a meditation on gentle entry, from stillness to action, informed by a desire to provide a counterpoint to our current political context. Navigating his own white privilege, Schlichting is interested in a mindful creative process that finds ways to disrupt patterns of white supremacy and his own comfort and complacency to inform both his life and work. While his process usually begins by asserting movement language that develops from a kinesthetic impulse followed by reflection and rigorous review and repetition, this work will adhere to an increased responsibility to acknowledge the moment with a thoughtful response. With this work, he’ll weave cultural associations and vivid metaphors to create webs of dialogue between existing and serendipitous relationships.
During his residency, Schlichting will host a series of one-on-one conversations with scholars from disparate fields from the university and Tallahassee community, opening dialogue on ideas behind the work and inviting new perspectives to inspire, shape and challenge his creative process. Writer Holly Bass also joins Schlichting’s residency as part of MANCC’s writer’s initiative.
This residency, is in part, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Chris Schlichting Biography:
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. 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 Fellowship, 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.
Collaborators in Residence
Performers
- Tristan Koepke
- Laura Selle Virtucio
- Maggie Zepp
Writer
- Holly Bass
Entrypoint – Informal Showing
School of Dance Forum
Black Box Studio
Montgomery Hall, FSU
Wednesday, February 22 at 10:30 am
This showing is open to the public, community members are encourage to attend.
For reservations please email info@mancc.org.
