MFAEIP Summer Hothouse | August 4-6, 2023
At an historical moment when dance artists continue to slow down, redirect, and adapt to changing patterns of cultural and artistic production, the need to protect space to explore the reach of dance without the pressure of a "product" in sight is most urgent.
The Duke Dance MFAEIP Summer Hothouse offers dedicated space for current students and graduate dance alumni to gather for a long weekend to affirm, support and engage a range of artistic research approaches facilitated by esteemed guest faculty artists.
MFAEIP students and alumni have a lifelong invitation to return to the air condition-less Ark, our beloved “hothouse” where, for two and a half days, dance makers will engage in morning movement practice with Clarice Young, incubate creative and choreographic strategies mid-afternoon during creative process workshops with Reggie Wilson; and partake in creative and cultural ecology building with 2023 Guggenheim fellow/dance artist Makini.
All Ark sessions are designed to maximize movement experimentation and expand artists’ creative and infrastructural strategies in meaningful and personal ways.
The Duke Dance Program is thrilled to welcome Makini, Reggie Wilson, and Clarice Young to our interdisciplinary program and research incubator. Read more about their accomplishments and creative interests below.
Guest Artists
Makini is a choreographer, performer, and video artist based between traditional lands of the Tutelo-Saponi speaking peoples and lands of the Lenape peoples. Makini grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with siblings and cousins. Early exposure to concert dance was through African dance and capoeira performances on California college campuses where Makini's Pan- Africanist parents studied and worked.
Makini did not start “formal” dance training until college with Umfundalai, Kariamu Welsh’s contemporary African dance technique. Makini's work continues to be influenced by various sources, including foundations in those living rooms and parties, early technical training in contemporary African dance, continued study of contemporary dance and performance, movement trainings with dancer and anatomist Irene Dowd around anatomy and proprioception, and sociological research of and technical training in J-sette performance with Jermone Donte Beacham.
Through artistic work, Makini strives to engage in and further dialogues with Black queer folks, to create lovingly agitating performance work that recognizes History as only one option for the contextualization of the present, and to continue to encourage artists to understand themselves as part of a larger community of workers who are imagining pathways toward economic ecosystems that prioritize care, interdependence, and delight.
In 2008, Makini co-founded idiosynCrazy productions and co-directed it with Shannon Murphy. The company produced performance work and served as a resource for public conversations around the integrations of art into society, and the social responsibility of the artist. Since 2011, Makini has worked collaboratively with J-Sette artist Jermone Donte Beacham on a series of visual and performance works called Let ‘im Move You.
Makini has performed with Marianela Boán, Silvana Cardell, devynn emory, Emmanuelle Hunyh, Tania Isaac, Kun-Yang Lin, C. Kemal Nance, Ligia Lewis, Marissa Perel, Leah Stein, Keith Thompson, Kate Watson-Wallace, Merián Soto, Reggie Wilson, Jesse Zaritt, and Kariamu Welsh (as a member of Kariamu & Company), and was an Assistant Professor of Dance at Swarthmore College from 2009-2018.
Performances and awards include: a 2010-2011 Live Arts Brewery Fellowship (Philadelphia), a 2012 Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship (Philadelphia), a 2013 NRW Tanzrecherche Fellowship (Germany), a 2013 New York Live Arts Studio Series (then, Dance Theater Workshop) residency with Jesse Zaritt (NYC), a 2016 Independence Fellowship (Philadelphia), a 2017 Sacatar Residency Fellowship (Bahia, Brazil), a 2017 MAP Fund award with Jermone Donte Beacham, a 2017 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant with Jermone Donte Beacham, a 2018 MANCC residency, a 2019 EMPAC residency, a 2020 Creative Capital Award, a 2020 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant-to-Artists award, a 2023 Herb Alpert Award, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, and three Swarthmore College Cooper Foundation grants for presenting other artists (Swarthmore, PA).
Reggie Wilson founded Fist & Heel Performance Group in 1989. Wilson draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and combines them with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he often calls “post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances.”
His work has been presented nationally and internationally at venues such as Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, and Summerstage (NYC), Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival (Lee, MA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), UCLA Live, and Redcat (Los Angeles), VSA NM (New Mexico), Myrna Loy (Helena, MT), The Flynn (Burlington, VT), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Dance Umbrella (Austin, TX), Linkfest and Festival e'Nkundleni (Zimbabwe), Dance Factory (South Africa), Danças na Cidade (Portugal), Festival Kaay Fecc (Senegal), The Politics of Ecstasy, and Tanzkongress 2013 (Germany).
Wilson is a graduate of New York University, Tisch School of the Arts (1988, Larry Rhodes, Chair). He has studied composition and been mentored by Phyllis Lamhut; Performed and toured with Ohad Naharin before forming Fist and Heel. He has lectured, taught and conducted workshops and community projects throughout the US, Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. He has traveled extensively: to the Mississippi Delta to research secular and religious aspects of life there; to Trinidad and Tobago to research the Spiritual Baptists and the Shangoists; and also to Southern, Central, West and East Africa to work with dance/performance groups as well as diverse religious communities. He has served as visiting faculty at several universities including Yale, Princeton and Wesleyan. Mr. Wilson is the recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance's McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001). Wilson is also a 2002 BESSIE-New York Dance and Performance Award recipient for his work The Tie-tongued Goat and the Lightning Bug Who Tried to Put Her Foot Down and a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.
He has been an artist advisor for the National Dance Project and Board Member of Dance Theater Workshop. In recognition of his creative contributions to the field, Mr. Wilson was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow and is a 2009 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Dance. His evening-length work The Good Dance–dakar/brooklyn had its World premiere at the Walker Art Center and NY premiere on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2009 Next Wave Festival. In 2012, New York Live Arts presented a concert of selected Wilson works, theRevisitation, to critical acclaim and the same year he was named a Wesleyan University’s Creative Campus Fellow, received an inaugural Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and received the 2012 Joyce Foundation Award for his successful work Moses(es) which premiered in 2013. His critically acclaimed work CITIZEN, premiered 2016 (FringeArts – World; BAM NextWave 2016 – NYC); both these works continue to tour. Wilson was curator of Danspace Project’s Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018) and created the commissioned work “…they stood shaking while others began to shout” specifically for the space at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Most recently, he curated Grounds That Shout! (and others merely shaking), a series of performances in several Philadelphia historic sacred spaces. His newest work is titled, POWER.
Clarice Young is an artist, teacher, choreographer, collaborator, and performer who researches the intersection of African Diasporic dance and contemporary modern dance. Melding elements of Afro-Caribbean, modern, and West African styles, she uses fundamentals from each to uncover ways to stabilize and release the body. Clarice received her BFA in Dance from The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and her MFA in Dance from Hollins University. A Louisiana native, Young was an original member of choreographer and Artistic Director Camille A. Brown's company Camille A. Brown & Dancers and served as an assistant to the director. She was also a member of choreographer and Artistic Director Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company, acting as the first rehearsal director.
Clarice collaborated with fellow artist Francine E. Ott in Outta the Box at Dixon Place, performed her solo work i am… at Judson Church, and showcased her choreography re(belle) at the North Carolina Dance Festival. In 2019 she started The Clarice Young Project as a way to celebrate Black culture and life out loud through the art of dance. Since then, students along with faculty from UNC Greensboro and NC State University have performed each year at Greensboro Project Space honoring Black History Month. Clarice became the inaugural recipient of the Doug Risner Professor of Dance Award in 2021, which supports her research documenting the movement style of choreographer Ronald K. Brown. Presently, Young serves as an Assistant Professor of Dance and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at UNC Greensboro.