Dear Everyone – MANCC Artists, Cultural Leadership, Funders, and Interested Folx ~

I write with news that I will be stepping down from my position as director of the Maggie Allesee
National Center for Choreography (MANCC) at the end of this 2024 calendar year. This will
mark 10.5 years at MANCC; if you count my first arts and culture job after graduate school, it
has been almost 40 years in the field as an engaged witness to an extraordinary number of
shapeshifting, remarkable works and evolving practices by national and international dance and
performance artists, composers, musicians, interdisciplinary and visual artists, as well as other
creators, refusing category, along the way. Such bounty, of course, has also lived alongside the
many shifts and challenges in the field driven by both changing and sometimes aggravatingly
fixed political, social, cultural, and/or economic dynamics. We are, as I write, currently amidst a
host of rapid changes, from those unconscionably long overdue to those, it seems to me,
confoundingly shortsighted. But this has been my life’s work and for all of it, I am so very
grateful.
 
I will get to MANCC shortly, but that ‘first post-MFA’ job was at the Ohio Arts Council as the
Individual Artists Fellowship Program’s Coordinator. A practicing artist then, I also needed a job.
Since then, I have held director and artistic director positions, beginning at the then just
launched Wexner Center, followed by Dance Theater Workshop (National Performance Network
& the international Suitcase Fund), 7 years as a freelance consultant working for independent
artists, non-profit arts organizations and private foundations, Movement Research, back to
Dance Theater Workshop, and on through the Workshop’s merger with New York Live Arts.
These positions have taken me around the country and all over the globe and have given me
immeasurable opportunities to serve innovative artists. In 2014, I left NYC and moved to
Tallahassee to oversee MANCC.
 
MANCC is celebrating its 20^th anniversary year. In 2014, I inherited a ten-year-old,
one-of-a-kind choreographic center in the U.S. with a programmatic incubator framework that
puts pioneering artists, working at all stages of a life’s journey, and their creative processes,
first. Jennifer Calienes, MANCC’s founding director, was stepping down after developing a
nationally recognized residency program. We had already partnered together on several
National Endowment for the Arts grants whereby artists received MANCC residencies followed
by Dance Theater Workshop commissions, a one-week technical residency, and presentations. I
also inherited four staff, two who have continued with me to this day. To them, I sing all praise –
Ansje Burdick, MANCC’s managing director and Chris Cameron, its full-time media specialist.
No one has been luckier to have had such dedicated, gifted, strategic collaborators in moving
the singular mission of MANCC forward.
 
Together, we have over these past ten years continued, and built upon, MANCC’s core
residency program, always in conversation with artists and their needs. We have fundraised for,
initiated and continued to implement four additional programs: Embedded Writer,
Commissioning Publications, Archive Residency, and MANCC Forward Dialogues (a laboratory
for emergent practices). We have hosted young makers and 80-year-old artists, and those at
every stage of career and project in between. And throughout, MANCC has continued to bring
attention to FSU and the School of Dance as it has also inspired and offered career
opportunities through networking for our students.
In total, over its first 20 years, MANCC has supported 157 artists (many in multi-year
residencies) and 1,207 collaborators, including dancers, performers, composers, musicians,
designers, dramaturgs, writers, artist managers, etc., in 214 residencies and 8 pre-residency
site visits. Since 2018, MANCC has also commissioned 14 publications by lead artists and their
embedded writers. These residencies have included innumerable Entrypoints – MANCC’s
notable program whereby residency artists engage with our campus and civic communities, as
informed by their research.
 
From a myriad of opportunities we offer to artists: from research and experimentation in
movement and production to creative process documentation, interviews and published writings;
from meetings with campus scholars and civic community leaders to visits to land, places and
buildings that hold significant value for artists’ community-based inquiries; and from 20 years of
creative process materials in an archive singular in the U.S. to a range of residency
engagement activities with students, faculty and the general public – MANCC has mattered to
artists. Ask those who have been here.
 
I will be writing more when I step down – both my own creative writing and something about the
field. The work goes forward. But lastly, for now, I offer my unending gratitude.
 
– THANK YOU to all the Artists with whom I have worked, here at MANCC and over all the
decades before, and for whose explorations – from seedlings of ideas through transformative
creations, I have witnessed. You have all been my teacher!!
 
– THANK YOU to MANCC’s namesake, Margaret (Maggie) Strum Acheson Allesee (1928 –
2023), who both endowed MANCC and continued to provide financial and cheerleading support
to us. We still miss you Maggie. You were a visionary!
 
– THANK YOU to MANCC’s funders, including the Mellon Foundation, for 13 years of essential
support that enabled so much artistic inquiry, through core multi-year residencies, the
development of the four initiatives mentioned above, and a research associate position; the
National Endowment for the Arts and their panels, who have funded MANCC residencies every
year but one since 2006; and to the Sustainable Arts Foundation, whose funding enabled us to
act on our conviction that parent-artists deserve childcare support!
 
– THANK YOU to the many strategic PARTNERS along the way, whose individual and collective
belief in the absolute necessity and power of artists sustained the work.
 
– And THANK YOU to Florida State University, the College of Fine Arts, the School of Dance,
and MANCC’s exceptional staff. I leave MANCC and its critical dual roles, within the larger
ecosystem of dance and performance and as a singular, inspirational model for our students as
they test and expand their views around career choices and artistic practices … in your hands.
 
Love forward,
Carla