MFAEIP Summer Hothouse | August 16-18, 2024
The MFAEIP Summer Hothouse offers space for current graduate students and alumni to gather in community for a long weekend of dance and choreographic strategies facilitated by a pair of esteemed guest artists. The Duke Dance Program is proud to provide dedicated time and space each year to slow down and explore the reach of dance without the pressure of a "product" in sight.
MFAEIP students and alumni have a lifelong invitation to return each summer to the air condition-less Ark, our beloved “hothouse.” Over two and a half days, morning and afternoon practices sessions are designed to maximize movement experimentation and expand artists’ creative and infrastructural strategies in meaningful and personal ways. This summer, dance makers will engage in morning contemporary dance class drawing upon movement fundamentals across the African Diaspora led by Clarice Young and will participate in creative process workshops in the afternoons with artist-curator Deborah Goffe. The weekend will wrap up with a group discussion focused on building sustainable and creative infrastructures for dance, facilitated by Deborah Goffe and Professor Sarah Wilbur.
Guest Artists
Deborah Goffe
Director, Scapegoat Garden
Executive Director of the Austin Arts Center and Artist-in-Residence in Theater and Dance, Trinity College
Deborah Goffe is a dance maker, performer, educator, and performance curator who cultivates environments and experiences through choreographic, design, and social processes. She is driven by an enduring commitment to world-making, support of vibrant local dance ecologies, and the role of curatorial practice in those processes. Since its founding in 2002, Scapegoat Garden has functioned as her primary vehicle for artistic and curatorial practice—a means to forge relationships between artists and communities, helping people see, create and contribute to a greater vision of ourselves, each other, and the places we call home.
Deborah’s performance works have been performed in homes, churches, gardens, galleries, and regional, national, and international performance venues. She is a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee for her current project, Liturgy|Order|Bridge, and a Pillow Lab Residency artist at Jacob’s Pillow.
Through the years, Deborah has channeled her interests in local arts ecosystems through initiatives that provide space for artistic process, incubate new work, and strengthen networks. Her graduate research at Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) focused on the intersection of sustainable dance practice, locality, arts ecosystem formation, habits of perception, and black radical tradition(s) as an urgent form of curatorial practice. These concerns form a foundation for her current artistic work and her position as Executive Director of the Austin Arts Center and Artist-in-Residence in Theater and Dance at Trinity College (Hartford, CT).
Workshop Description:
Creative Praxis: Friday, Aug. 16, 1pm-4pm and Saturday, August 17, 1pm-4pm
Over the course of two afternoon sessions, Deborah will invite participants to gather in much the same way she has been gathering with local culture bearers in the making and re-iteration of her current project, Liturgy|Order|Bridge. We will draw from its toolbox of processes, structures, rituals and origin stories to generate something(s) we might carry forward into our own experiments. Along the way, we’ll consider the ways we navigate inside and outside authorized infrastructures to define trajectories that are responsive to (and adamant about) the needs of our work and the people with whom (and for whom) we make it.
This will be followed by a facilitated group discussion on Sunday, August 18, 10:30am-noon: Future Dreaming, Nesting Dance Ecosystem, lead by Deborah Goffe and Professor Sarah Wilbur.
Clarice Young
Associate Professor of Dance and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at UNC Greensboro
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 Associate Professor of Dance and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at UNC Greensboro.
Workshop Description:
Movement sessions with Clarice Young: Friday, August 16, 10a-12p and Saturday, August 17, 10a-12p:
The class draws upon fundamentals from movement across the African Diaspora and Contemporary dance. Special attention is given to rhythm and how it feels to investigate it amongst a community of dancers.