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Home » News » MANCC Welcomes Visiting Artists Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener with Claudia La Rocco

MANCC Welcomes Visiting Artists Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener with Claudia La Rocco

Published March 20, 2018

Desire Lines: translation

March 18 – 31


Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener (NY) with Claudia La Rocco (CA)

The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography is pleased to host Visiting Artists Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener with Claudia La Rocco in residence to develop their latest work.

After working together for years in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and 7 years of collaborative performance and research, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener come to MANCC to develop their new work, Desire Lines: translation, by engaging in the idea of indexing their practice while exploring the nature of transmission of movement ideas.

Desire Lines are alternate, unofficial routes or social trails in nature and landscape architecture. They represent an accumulated record of disobedience and transformation. We apply this phenomenon to an improvisation practice which maps individual and collective action. The choreographic material is the attention of the performer, a navigation of impulses and adaptive systems. The dance offers shifting and emergent models for coexistence, assimilation, and rebellion. Our choices create a world built of its own desires, a provisional utopia constantly making and unmaking itself.

For Desire Lines: translation, the pair draws connections in the areas of improvisation, collage, task-based modes, mimesis, meditation, and transcendentalism. The work and processes of Robert Rauschenberg, Anna Halprin, Charles Atlas, architect Claude Bragdon, and spirit-medium and artist Ethel Le Rossignol will be used as road maps to navigate internal psychological landscapes, external architectural landscapes, and collective desire.

During the residency, Mitchell and Riener will open the doors on their rehearsal process to the public in two Open Studio sessions, Thursday, March 22, and Friday, March 23, 2:00-6:00pm. Observers are welcome to come and go as needed within these times.
Mitchell and Riener will also present their current work in two Wednesday School of Dance Forum presentations on March 21st and 28th. Both Forum presentations will be held at 10:30am in Montgomery Hall.

Writer Claudia La Rocco joins Mitchell and Riener in her capacity as artist-in-residence at On the Boards in Seattle. Through a three-year Doris Duke grant, she is creating context around contemporary performance (focused on, but not exclusive to, the artists at OntheBoards.tv), in part through building partnerships with institutions such as MANCC. Working with these organizations, and numerous artists and thinkers in the field, La Rocco’s project is an effort to spin constellations of ideas around ephemeral works, allowing individual viewers various avenues into these performances through such materials as interviews, essays, poems, drawings, and archival videos. Some of these materials are pre-existing, while others are being commissioned. The Duke award is an artist-led grant, and the focus is on privileging individual perspectives, styles, and voices, approaching the creation of context as its own artistic practice.

While at MANCC, La Rocco will host several screenings of performances from the OntheBoards.TV platform and host a dialogue around engaging with dance through digital media. Details will be announced by email.

Entrypoints:

Open Studio Rehearsals:

Thursday, March 22, 2-6PM
Friday, March 23, 2-6PM

Work-in-Progress Showing:
@ School of Dance FORUM

Wednesday, March 21, 10:30AM, Montgomery Hall, Studio 215
Wednesday, March 28, 10:30AM, Montgomery Hall, Nancy Smith Fichter Theatre