BAX Announces 2010/11 Artists In Residence and Space Grant Recipients

Ten years ago, the ARTIST IN RESIDENCE (AIR) program grew from two artists to four. It is only fitting that the program is growing again for our 20th season.

We are very excited to announce that for our 20th Season, we have grown the AIR program by adding two new residency positions. Along side two Dance AIR and two Theater AIR, two Research Fellows will be working on research projects that do not have an immediate performance component.

These six exceptional artists are provided with an artistic home base for a one to two year period, giving them a tangible sense of permanence and place. Resident artists have the use of four spaces suitable for theater, dance and performance work and are offered up to 200 hours of free rehearsal space (per year), a stipend, formal presentations of new works and works in progress, and administrative and technical support. Opportunities are also available to curate, teach in the public schools, and to work with BAX's student population.

In response to feedback from the community, last year we changed the format of the SPACE GRANT program, splitting it into two distinct work periods.

GROUP ONE rehearses during the Summer months and perform the work they are developing elsewhere. GROUP TWO rehearses during the Fall months and performs their work as part of BAX's 2010/11 Performance Season.

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE -- THEATER

CATHARINE DILL / EXPLODING MOMENT -- Ye're Here, Cuzin! is an original, full length, multi-media performance, comprising a reverse-"Grapes of Wrath" road trip, a surrealist series of episodes narrated by a passionately accurate (or possibly delusional) Mrs. Bird, channeling the perceptions of a nine-year-old boy (Kid One). The oldest of two children, Kid One watches from the backseat as his parents embark on a deluded journey to the Ozarks. As his parents daydream, bicker and complain, Kid One begins to interpret his surroundings with his own mix of confusion, rebellion and geographic chauvinism aimed at his Southern counterparts. [ more ]

DAN FISHBACK -- Born in 1981, the year the AIDS epidemic began, performance artist Dan Fishback explores his own generation's experience of death, sexuality and disease in his new solo piece, thirtynothing. Using visual work from lost gay artists as a springboard and backdrop, Fishback weaves stories from his own life through stories from theirs, creating an abstract theatrical landscape where the living and the dead can co-mingle and collaborate.

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE -- DANCE

LEVI GONZALEZ will be developing a new solo work based on researching various modes of performance technique. By taking in and breaking down the essentials of performance, I will then develop a very personal exploration on the meaning of performance by constructing and inhabiting various performative states and reflecting on the ways in which these states create or obscur vulnerability. I will also collaborate with a dramaturg/scenographer and composer in an effort to have a dialogue with both the site of performance (the theater/studio space) and its sound environment. [ more ]

MINA NISHIMURA -- RAP (Retrospective Alchemy Project) [working title] takes resources from people's struggles, confusion or commonplaces in their past 10 years, then shuffles it, mixes it, processes it and refines it in order to create unexpected sublime landscape. Collecting resources by interviews with performers and other arbitrarily selected people is the first step. The collected resources are transformed into choreographic movements, texts, sound and visual materials. Those materials are mixed and woven into each other in space and time. In creation process, there are also group sessions to develop psychic abilities. Document from the shared experience becomes operative as a magic effect in the final phase of RAP. [ more ]

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE -- DANCE RESEARCH FELLOWS:

LUCIANA ACHUGAR will enter the studio with a less goal oriented approach. First and foremost, Luciana is interested in developing her dance teaching, and will work on developing exercises that will allow her to teach movement, being connected in the body in a way that is very specific to her own philosophies about the body, and the pleasure of being in the body in general. [ more ]

JENNIE MARYTAI LIU -- Phase two of LANDS AND PEOPLES is driven in part from this love of human idiosyncracy - displayed through movement, stories and behavior. Over the course of a year, Jennie will seek out and get to know a group of three or four individuals who have immigrated to the US in their lifetimes, and for whom the performing arts (dance, theater, traditional/folk forms) is or has been a dominant presence in their lives. She is interested in how the skills, values and worldviews of a performing artist might range between communities, sub-cultures, personal experiences -- and how these art-inflected imperatives might have been shaped or shifted by the rupture of immigration. [ more ]

SPACE GRANT RECIPIENTS -- GROUP ONE

TARA O'CON will be working on a piece in a vignette format arranged in solo, duet, and trios, looking for an arch in which these sections will become part of a whole site-specific production, which will be presented in December 2010 at The Chocolate Factory Theater.

STUDIO SIX THEATER COMPANY will bring their ensemble driven approach to Yevgeny Grishkovets' Winter, a play that presents the comical tragedy of how we navigate our way through a dangerous and impossible world, with a philosophical eye and great theatricality.

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS will be working on Twaddle Tales, a whimsical cycle of five short works, which will explore how themes of xenophobia, racism, machismo, quackery, ageism, ignorance, abandonment, sacrifice, cruelty, and erroneous identity can perpetuate widespread cultural confusion.

SPACE GRANT RECIPIENTS -- GROUP TWO

VANESSA ANSPAUGH will be working on Casey, Cassidy Cassandra..., a new piece which explores the back-body and alternative ways for the arrangement of space as people and collaborators are more integrated and less hierarchical.

CORINNE DONLY will be working on Wild Whore Says: "Couldn't Drag Me Away," an original play for two men and two mares.

DEVYNN EMORY will be delving into a new work, with a focus on the duet form, Emory will be continuing the exploration into the ideas of what are called "perfect imperfections" -- math, patterns, rhythms, and hidden human behaviors -- a concept the company has been developing for the last 8 years.

AIR ARTIST ADVISER

VICTORIA LIBERTORE, former Theater Artist In Residence, will be returning to BAX as an adviser to the Artists In Residence, as a teacher, and will be curating several events throughout the season. 

The Artists-In-Residence Program and the Space Grant Program are supported, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.

BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange is a professional community arts center located in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Artist opportunities include the Artist in Residence program, the Space Grant program, the Subsidized Rehearsal Space Rental program, Professional Development Workshops for Artists, and more. For more information about BAX and its opportunities for performing artists please call 718-832-0018 or visit us on the web at www.bax.org.