Doolittle+Bird

The third time was definitely the charm. With sold-out shows and classes, great conversations and solid partnerships, this annual festival produced by Motion State Arts is going strong.

Between 2017–2020, Bebe Miller Company gathered with 80+ dance artists, presenters, funders, technologists, scholars and educators to investigate questions about dance artists, their creative practice, and the value of artist-driven archives—sharing their varied experiences and methodologies of conceiving, documenting, archiving and sharing the dance-making practice.

Those thoughts and talks have now been gathered in a dynamic online resource—Vault—chock full of videos of conversations, presentations, writing and other gathered materials. We hope that Vault serves as an invitation to continue the conversation and add to our incredible body of shared knowledge and experience.

It was an honor to work on this project from conception to completion!

What a thrill to support the creation and premiere of this new collaboration between Bebe Miller and longtime dancers Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones. Tether is an improvised dance, sparked by curiosity about Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s manner of exchange with each other and their collaborators, and the evidence of the tethers they have left behind. Miller, Hauser and Jones share a 20-plus-year creative scrutiny via dance-making together—Tether welcomes Cunningham as a fourth partner. The work asks: might Cunningham’s Loops (1971) as a text amplify some aspect of the artists’ own shared practice? Could Cunningham’s notion of coexisting and predetermined materials serve as a trigger, a tether, for their own artistic interests? Pianist Adam Tendler’s rendition of Cage’s music score acts as a parallel connection to the Cage/Cunningham conversation.

Presented as part of “Unavailable Memory: In Conversation with Cunningham & Cage,” an evening of dance and music co-Produced by The Merce Cunningham Trust.

We’re over the moon to have received funding from both the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, and a National Dance Project Production Grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts, in support of Rhythm Bath! This vital funding will help ensure this suite of performance-installations gets shared far and wide.

It’s been a total pleasure administrating this Feldenkrais teacher training, run by Jeff Haller/Inside Moves. There was plenty of pivoting necessary over the past four years—the trainees, fellow staff and faculty persevered with grace and compassion. Congratulations to all!

We’re over the moon to announce that Rhythm Bath, Studio Susan Marshall’s collaboration with set designer Mimi Lien being developed in partnership with the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University, has been awarded a grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage! This notoriously challenging and competitive grant was also—surprisingly!—one of the most fun proposals we’ve ever worked on, in large part because of our amazing partner on this project, Lisa Sonneborn, Media Arts & Culture Director at the IOD. Cannot wait to share this project far and wide!

We were thrilled to be at PEAK Performances (Montclair State University, NJ) July 25–August 5 for the first creative residency for Studio Susan Marshall’s Rhythm Bath project!

We’re thrilled to have helped with Rosy Simas Danse‘s successful applications to the National Endowment for the Arts for their Grants for Arts Projects and American Rescue Plan support! The funding will support RSD’s operations and well as she who lives on the road to war, an installation/dance performance created in response to global loss and the collective need to grieve, condole and gather in peace and reconciliation, premiering in September 2021.

There’s nothing we love more than presenting dance performances with inspiring folks. THANK YOU to the amazing community who came out and dug in to the second “annual” Motion State Dance Festival. After an inaugural festival in March 2020 and a pandemic pause, it was thrilling to be presenting live and in-person dance again. We’re invigorated by the creativity and conversations and contemplations and challenges, and so grateful to all who helped make it happen. Feeling very appreciative of the artists, crew, supporters and the Motion State Arts team!

Big thanks to the New York State Council on the Arts for their support of Studio Susan Marshall’s Two Person Operating System Type 2, the newest collaboration between choreographer Marshall and visual artist Martha Friedman.