New Dance Alliance Announces 2023-24 Black Artists Space to Create and LiftOff Resident Artists

New Dance Alliance (NDA) announces the new cycle of resident artists for its Black Artists Space to Create (BASC) and LiftOff residencies.

The BASC Residency offers three artists a residency at Modern Accord Depot in Accord, NY. The 2023-24 recipients are Mickey Davidson, Jordan Deal, and Aya Shabu. Each artist will receive a one-week residency with unlimited access to a dance studio, full living space, and a $2,000 stipend. The residency is designed as both a retreat and a space to create without the pressure of developing a new project. Additionally, artists have access to complimentary studio space at New Dance Alliance's loft in Tribeca throughout the season, and are invited to show work at NDA's annual Performance Mix Festival. Artists were selected by the 2023-24 BASC Curatorial Committee: Davalois Fearon, Ayan Felix, Djassi daCosta Johnson, Miriam Parker, and Majesty Royale-Jackson.

The BASC residency project was created in 2020 in response to current movements within the dance community and the movements they are building upon, and was initially led by NDA advisory board member Angie Pittman. As an artist services organization and presenter, NDA has been guided by the core question: What does it mean to center and support Black artists in this field? NDA is working to radically reimagine what it means to serve Black artists right and to do so in the specific spirit of reparations. As part of NDA's mission, it is committed to continuing to listen, learn, and to push boundaries of what it means to create a more equitable dance field.

New Dance Alliance's 12th round of LiftOff residencies takes place at NDA's studio in Tribeca and provides six movement-based performance artists with a minimum of 36 hours of rehearsal space, a $500 stipend, and two Work Sessions designed for artists to share their creative process and participate in a community exchange. The 2023-24 recipients are Justin Cabrillos, Tal Halevi, Kashia Kancey, Joy Norton, Kimiko Tanabe, and Yolette Yellow-Duke. The 2023-24 resident artists were selected by an artist panel including Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Ursula Eagly, Julie Mayo, evan ray suzuki, and Shannon Yu.

 

2023-24 BASC Residency Artists

           

Mickey Davidson has primarily been a choreographer for her own company Mickey D. & Friends, a group of dancers and musicians who explore and perform the interlocking relationship between music and dance. The company toured DANCE! RHYTHM! DANCE!, JUBA,JUKIN AND JAZZIN, MELLOW MOVES, and SWINGIN'IN at the Savoy. From 1993 to 2013, Davidson was director of Okra Dance Company, taking over the leadership from its founding director Phillip Bond. Davidson was one of three choreographers for the European tour of the Broadway production of Black and Blue. She set and maintained the swing and blues choreography inherited from Frankie Manning. Davidson enjoyed a collaborative relationship with poet/playwright Ntozake Shange for more than 20 years. For the 20th anniversary production of For Colored Girls, she won an Audelco Award for choreography under Shanges' direction. Davidson's performing experiences include affiliations with Sounds in Motion Dance Company, Norma Miller's Lindy Hoppers, Charles Cookie Cook, Savoy Swingers, Roots of Brazil, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Sharon Freeman, Ahmed Abdullah, Jeanne Lee, Oliver Lake, Frankie Manning, and the late Steve McCall, to name a few. She is a veteran of arts in education, serving NYC, New Jersey, and Connecticut school systems (1977-2014), through performances and residencies in African American dance styles and their connection to American history.

Jordan Deal, also known as ROSEKILLJUPITER, is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary practitioner, performance artist, and alchemist. Their investigative practice uses performance, sound, image, and their body as a conduit between unseen forces and the materializations of socio-political structures and mythologies. They have been investigating technologies/modalities of relations and movement that harness and disperse chaotic forces as a subversive material and methodology. Deal has presented performance work in New York City at Judson Memorial Church, Center for Performance Research, Amant Foundation, and The Brick Theater, Cafe OTO (London), Icebox Project Space, MAAS Building (Philadelphia), and The Lab (San Francisco), among others. They have exhibited at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Vox Populi, Grizzly Grizzly, Fleisher Art Memorial, CP Projects Space, Kohl Gallery, and S.N.A.I.L Gallery. They have recently been awarded a 2023-2024 artistic fellowship at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and were a fall 2022 research fellow at Amant Foundation in Brooklyn. In 2021, they were a fellow at the Headlong Performance Institute in Philadelphia. Deal's films have been in Blackstar Film Festival (Philadelphia), Indie Fest (Los Angeles), and the Paris Film Festival

Aya Shabu is the creator and spirited conductor of Whistle Stop Tours, a walking tour company re-membering African American neighborhoods through the performing arts. Shabu has choreographed for original documentary theater including The Parchman Hour for the 50th anniversary reunion of The Freedom Riders in Jackson, MS (2011). An alumna of the African American Dance Ensemble, Shabu has performed with Ronald K. Brown and Sweet Honey in the Rock, and currently dances and drums with The Magic of African Rhythm. Shabu uses performance for personal and community healing through Black women's stories. As the associate director of arts and culture, Shabu protects the genius of Black parents and neighborhoods through community art-making and curation.

2023–24 LiftOff Residency Artists

Fall/Winter LiftOff Artists:

Tal Halevi is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher based in New York City. Born and raised in Israel, she was a member of the Rina Schenfeld Dance Theater In Tel Aviv and has performed with choreographers Nimrod Freed, Jeanette Stoner, and with New York Theater Ballet. Her choreography, exploring the interplay of physical embodiment, shifting states of consciousness, and their expression through movement, has been presented in Europe, Israel, and the United States. In New York, her work has been shown at Lincoln Center, Dance Theater Workshop's Fresh Tracks, Dixon Place, Dance Now Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church, Joyce Soho, Performance Mix, and the 92NY. A registered somatic movement educator and a certified teacher and practitioner of Body-Mind Centering, she has led workshops on using somatic practices for dance-making, and has published several articles, including "The Anatomy of Risk” (2013) and "The Forms Things Take: Dance as Somatic Exploration” (2017) in Currents magazine.

Kimiko Tanabe is a fourth-generation Japanese American artist. She explores the mediums of performance art, dance, writing, origami, and paper, and is in a committed partnership with her .38 Muji pen. She is forever fascinated with Japanese folklore and as a lover of literature she finds herself making important life decisions under the eyes and influence of fiction. Her work combines her background in contemporary dance with her literary tendencies to create surreal performance art that is both joyful and haunting, and that gives platform and power to the Asian American emotional experience. For Tanabe, art is intimate and inexact. She graduated from Colorado College with a degree in creative writing and dance. She is a 2022 BAX Space Grant Recipient, a 2022 Gallim Moving Artist in Residence, a 2022 Colorado College Artist in Residence, 2021 Artist in Resident at The Floor, and a 2021 Fresh Ground Pepper PlayGround PlayGroup Residency Cohort Member. Tanabe currently performs with glenn potter-takata and Shannon Yu and has performed with marion spencer, Catherine Galasso Projects, Kizuna Dance, Seymour::Dance Collective, Lisa Fagan and Hannah Mitchell, HIJACK, and Nial Ibragimov.

Yolette Yellow-Duke (they/she) has been exploring their love for the arts their entire life. Originally from Brooklyn, they received their MA in dance performance with honors from the London Contemporary Dance School, where they wrote a dissertation examining cultural appropriation in dance and disparities between dancers of color and white dancers. While at LCDS, they trained at RESET 2020 with Wayne McGregor company members and at Gaga Lab in Tel Aviv. Yellow-Duke also trained at the Bates Dance Festival, Movement Research's MELT Intensive, and the American Dance Festival, where they were a stagecraft apprentice for companies including Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Ballet Folklorico, Shen Wei Dance Arts, and Pilobolus. As a performer, they have had the pleasure of working with Renegade Performance Group, Johnny Cruise Mercer, Kayla Farrish, J. Bouey, KINESIS PROJECT Dance Theatre, Camilo Godoy, Yun Cheng, and others. Their choreography has premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the HERE Arts Summer Sublet Series, and Movement Research at Judson Church.

Spring LiftOff Artists:

Justin Cabrillos is a choreographer, artist, and writer based in Brooklyn. His work has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater and Danspace Project in New York, and the IN>TIME Series in Chicago. Cabrillos has presented work at the Cultural Center of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Roulette, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Links Hall in Chicago. He has had residencies at Movement Research, Ucross, Yaddo, Zero Point Berlin, The Center for Performance Research, and The Momentary in Arkansas. He was a 2016 danceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz in Vienna under the mentorship of Tino Seghal, and a recipient of a Greenhouse grant from the Chicago Dancemaker's Forum. As a performer he is currently working with Ursula Eagley. He has worked with Jen Rosenblit, Julie Mayo, Every House Has a Door, and Jeremy Shaw. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in English literature from the University of Washington, Seattle. He teaches literature, composition, and creative writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Kashia Kancey is a Miami-born, Brooklyn-based performer and choreographer who earned her BFA in Dance from New World School of the Arts. Some of her choreographic history includes having work presented in The Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center through commissions by Peter London Global Dance Company, Movement Research at Judson Church, Dixon Place, and CreateART Performance. Kancey has performed in spaces such as Perez Art Museum Miami, South-Miami Dade Cultural Arts Center, Dance Place in Washington, DC, the American Dance Festival, The Yard, and New York Live Arts. She has danced with Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre, Adele Myers and Dancers, and Abby Z and the New Utility. She was most recently an apprentice with Urban Bush Women and is a company member with David Dorfman Dance. She is also a 2023 Gallim Moving Artist in Residence.

Joy Norton (she/they) is a versatile movement artist based in Brooklyn, originally from Minneapolis. Their artistry is characterized by performances that engage with the concepts of time, endurance, and improvisational movement dynamics. Norton merges visual arts, sound, and occasional choreography to create immersive experiences that celebrate the complexity of humanity through a Black/queer lens. Through a hypnotic journey into ancestral roots, reconnection with the earth, and critical examination of white supremacy, Norton weaves a tapestry of profound themes. Evocative storytelling, infused with elements of poetry and expressive facial shifts, becomes the vehicle through which they ignite emotions and inspire action within their audiences. Their research interests currently revolve around diverse topics, such as preparation for the apocalypse, envisioning a futuristic cultural paradigm shift, embodying natural landscapes, and exploring the performance of rest and detachment.

Black Artists Space to Create is made possible in part with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, Bernstein Family Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, and generous contributions from many individuals. LiftOff is supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, and individual donors.

About Modern Accord Depot

Modern Accord Depot (MAD) is the 2019 reinvention of the 1902 New York, Ontario & Western Railway depot in Accord, NY. In addition to preserving NYO&W architecture, artifacts, and history, MAD is a dynamic arts residency space and one-of-a-kind Hudson Valley getaway serving dual populations: artists, scholars, and non-profit arts organizations in need of residency space for creative meetings, research, workshops, and rehearsals, and travelers from near and far, in search of unforgettable vacation experiences.

MAD partners with Works & Process at the Guggenheim on the LaunchPAD residency series and New Dance Alliance on the Black Artists Space to Create residency series, administrates the in-house residency program MADarts, has hosted collaborations with Dancers Responding to AIDS and the Fisher Center at Bard College, and has premiered original work in the OMG Art Faire.

Across these programs, MAD has supported a dynamic group of dance, music, theater, and visual artists including Dani Adams, Michael Arden, Hope Boykin and Hope Boykin Dance, Rena Butler, The Chase Brock Experience, Sarah Chien, Leslie Cuyjet, Alexander Diaz, Eric Dietz, Ayan Felix, Ama Ma'at Gora, Kayla Hamilton, Nile Harris, Joe Iconis and Lauren Marcus, Angela Sigley Grossman, Lloyd Knight, Jack Ferver and Jeremy Jacob, Johnny Cruise Mercer, Marisa Michelson and Constellation Chor, Olivia Palacios, Miriam Parker, Angie Pittman, Pony Box Dance Theatre, RAWdance, Amy Ruhl, Amber Sloan, Taylor Stanley and Alec Knight, Caleb Teicher and Regina Spektor, Jackson Tucker-Meyer, Doug Varone and Dancers, Megan Williams, and Rowan Willigan. For more information, visit modernaccorddepot.com.

About New Dance Alliance

New Dance Alliance is a performing arts nonprofit. Its mission, from the earliest days, has been to support experimental movement-based artists. In recent years, we have shifted our focus, making an explicit commitment to equity and inclusion, creating programs centering the work of artists from historically marginalized communities. We provide space, residencies, performance, and networking opportunities that help artists cultivate relationships, develop their artistry, and open doors to share their work in the US and internationally.

NDA's legacy of services to artists and audiences began four decades ago when Karen Bernard opened up her Tribeca loft as a low-cost rehearsal space. From those first moments, its programs have grown organically and in direct response to artists and audiences. Today, NDA's goals remain deeply rooted in those founding principles and have expanded in response to current artistic challenges and goals. NDA's programming fosters artists and audiences through annual events, retreats, educational panels, and performances.

NDA programs include Performance Mix Festival, Black Artist Space to Create, LiftOff, Work Sessions,  Satellite, and Karen Bernard Projects.