Dance ProgramMFAEIP Summer Hothouse & Arks Incubator | June 6-July 15, 2022
The Duke Dance Program MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis (MFAEIP) presents an inaugural six-week movement and creative practice intensive designed to support the artistic evolution of Duke graduate dance students and alumni. Participating artists receive dedicated time, space and mentorship from a range of interdisciplinary guest artists.
Participants engage in morning movement classes, take workshops on creative strategies and critical response to works in progress, and build their existing networks through collaboration with the artists and faculty of partnering organization, the American Dance Festival (ADF).
The experimental dance and movement research labs take place at The Ark, the Dance Program's legacy site of dance practice and choreographic research on Duke's East campus.
During this inaugural summer, the MFA Hothouse is organized in two-parts: a two-week alumni hothouse, and a four-week intensive in collaboration with the artists of the American Dance Festival.
MFAEIP Alumni Hothouse | June 6-17, 2022
The two-week Alumni Hothouse is a dedicated space for MFAEIP alumni and current students to dance together, participate in creative process workshops led by guest artists and share current creative work. Alumni from all MFAEIP cohorts have a lifelong invitation to return to the air condition-less Ark, our beloved “hothouse” where movement experimentation develops slowly under collective witness.
MFAEIP Arks Incubator | June 20-July 15, 2022 | in collaboration with ADF
This same “laboratory” vibe extends into the MFAEIP Arks Incubator – an afternoon creative praxis and research lab led by guest artists who inhabit The Ark during the ADF Summer Dance Intensive, where current MFAEIP students continue to evolve their MFA thesis projects. Our graduates will dance in morning movement classes with ADF’s fantastic faculty and then return to the lab to further hone creative strategies and critical feedback from MFAEIP guest artists.
Hothouse 2022
Guest Artist Week One
June 6-10, 2022
Ajani Brannum (Los Angeles, CA)
Workshop: This Action
What's available to you in your process? Are you sure? What possibilities have yet to be considered? This week, we'll explore strategies for weaving through various domains of creative practice. We'll sense what it might be like to embrace context and contingency as baselines for making; the temporary, transient, and tangential will help us snake through skillsets we may find familiar, less familiar, unfamiliar, and otherwise.
Ajani Brannum is a transdisciplinary artist born in Anchorage, Alaska, raised in Columbia, South Carolina, and currently living in Los Angeles, California. Their practice — which spans performance, video, sound, writing and cartomancy — explores the problematics of belief; constructs of selfhood; and practices for moving, thinking and being. Ajani appeared as a guest artist with Cullberg (based in Stockholm, Sweden) for their 2015-2016 season, and danced in the Merce Cunningham Trust's Night of 100 Solos. A graduate of the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, Ajani holds a B.A. in English and Certificate in Dance from Princeton University, a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA, and is an alum of Jade T. Perry's Cecilia Weston Tarot Academy.
Guest Artist Week Two
June 13-17, 2022
Jaki Shelton Green (Durham, NC)
Workshop: What We Keep Keep Us: Exploring Our Human Museums
A series of creativity salons will focus on the excavation of our human museums. In our ever-increasing technological trance, how do we conflate or extrapolate public and private spheres of creativity and intimacy?
Jaki Shelton Green, ninth Poet Laureate of North Carolina appointed in 2018, is the first African American and third woman to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate and reappointed in 2021 for a second term by Governor Roy Cooper. She is a 2019 Academy of American Poet Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate appointment, 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. Jaki Shelton Green teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and is the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill. Additionally, she received the George School Outstanding Alumni Award in 2021. Her publications include: Dead on Arrival, Masks, Dead on Arrival and New Poems, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, breath of the song, published by Blair Publishers. Feeding the Light, i want to undie you published by Jacar Press, i want to undie you English /Italian bilingual edition published by Lebeg Publishers. 2020, she released her first poetry album, The River Speaks of Thirst and a CD, i want to undie you. 2022 Jaki Shelton Green appointed as the Poet Laureate in Residence at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Invited Public Sharing: Friday, June 17 from 4:00-5:00pm in The Ark
Guest Artist Week Three
June 20-24, 2022
Vangeline (New York, NY)
Workshop: Vangline will explore trauma-informed practices focusing on the parasympathetic nervous system and Noguchi Taiso.
Vangeline is a teacher, dancer and choreographer specializing in Japanese butoh. She is the artistic director of the Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute, an all-female dance company firmly rooted in the tradition of Japanese butoh while carrying it into the twenty-first century. Tying together butoh and activism, Vangeline founded both the New York Butoh Institute Festival and the festival Queer Butoh. Her award-winning program The Dream a Dream Project has brought butoh dance to incarcerated men and women across New York State for fifteen years. Her choreographed work has been performed internationally and her work as an educator, choreographer and curator has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, Japan Foundation and Asian American Arts Alliance, among others. Widely regarded as an expert in her field, Vangeline has taught at Cornell, NYU, Brooklyn College, CUNY, Sarah Lawrence and Princeton. She is the author of Butoh: Cradling Empty Space, which explores the intersection of butoh and neuroscience.
Guest Artist Week Four
June 27-July 1, 2022
Cara Hagan (New York, NY)
Workshop: Hagan will lead participants through a series of experiences that invite them to think about their relationships to the digital spaces we've all come to know so well, questions of what human residue remains in digital platforms, and how our histories - both screen and live histories - inform our experiences as consumers and makers.
Cara Hagan is a mover, maker, writer, curator, champion of just communities and a dreamer. In her work, no object or outcome is sacred—but the ritual to get there is. Hagan’s adventures take place as live performance, on screen, as installation, on the page and in collaboration with others in a multitude of contexts. Hagan has brought her interdisciplinary work to the Performática Festival (Mexico), the Conference on Geopoetics (Scotland), the Loikka Dance Film Festival (Finland), the Taos Poetry Festival (New Mexico) and the Dance on Camera Festival (New York). Recent residencies include the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron, and Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC, where her interdisciplinary project Essential Parts: A Guide to Moving through Crisis and Unbridled Joy is installed until summer 2022. Hagan is editor and contributor for the anthology Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom and author of the book, Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice.
Guest Artist Week Five
July 5-8, 2022 (no class Monday)
James Clotfelter (Durham, NC)
Workshop: Strategies for Production Design
This four-day intensive examines the role of design in live performance and aims to cultivate an expansive vision of the relationships between environment, design, and evolving projects.
James Clotfelter is committed to the creation of collaborative and socially conscious work for live performance, the built environment, and public space. Working broadly as a designer with a specialization in light, James runs an architectural lighting design practice, JCLD, and is the co-founder of Studio C Projects, a performance-based, collaborative research studio that investigates the intersections of movement, design, and architecture. His work in live performance has been presented throughout the US and internationally in a myriad of venues ranging from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Cairo Opera House to an abandoned utility warehouse in Poland and the rural Pennsylvania forest. James has a double MFA in Transdisciplinary Design and Lighting Design from Parsons School of Design in NYC.
Guest Artist Week Six
July 11-15, 2022
Gerald Casel (New Brunswick, NJ)
Workshop: Antiracist Creative Praxis
In this workshop, students look at methods that integrate social practice with creative research. Reflecting on Not About Race Dance, a collaborative choreographic response to the unacknowledged racial politics in U.S. postmodern dance along with his work on Dancing Around Race, a social practice working group that interrogates inequity in dance, Casel will encourage participants to articulate their own histories and practices doing similar endeavors and to see how they can contribute to the discourse on antiracsist and decolonial approaches to research.
Gerald Casel (he/they/siya) is a dance artist, equity activator and antiracist educator. As director of GERALDCASELDANCE, his choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. Casel is Professor and Chair of the Dance Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He has previously been a faculty member at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Palucca Hochschule für Tanz Dresden, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, California State University Long Beach, and UC Santa Cruz where he also served as the Provost of Porter College. A graduate of The Juilliard School with an MFA from UW-Milwaukee, they received a New York Dance and Performance Award “Bessie” for sustained achievement dancing in the companies of Stephen Petronio, Michael Clark, Stanley Love, Zvi Gotheiner, Sungsoo Ahn, and The Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Dancing Around Race, an ongoing community engaged-participatory process that interrogates systemic racial inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, continues to grow.