New Dance Alliance Announces 2022–23 Black Artists Space To Create And LiftOff Residency Artists

New Dance Alliance (NDA) has announced the 2022-23 Black Artists Space to Create (BASC) and LiftOff residency artists.

BASC is a project offering three Black artists a residency at Modern Accord Depot in Accord, NY. The 2022-23 recipients are Alexander Diaz, Ayan Felix, and Miriam Parker. Each artist will receive a one-week residency with unlimited access to a dance studio and full living space. Residency schedules are determined by the individual needs of the artists, who also receive a stipend of $2,000 and $250 for travel expenses. NDA offers this space for resting, dancing, creating, healing, grieving, laughing, and breathing. There is no expectation of production and artists do not have to present new work at the end of this residency. Additionally, the artists have access to complimentary studio space at NDA's studio throughout the 2022-23 season. The artists were selected by a BASC Curatorial Committee including Leslie Cuyjet, Lee Edwards, Alethea Pace, Nicole McClam, and Alicia Morales.

The BASC residency project was created in 2020 in response to current movements within the dance community and the movements they are building upon. 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 understands the stark reality that Black people are navigating not one but two pandemics: one is new, and one is 400 years old. NDA is working to radically reimagine what it means to serve Black artists right now and to do so in the specific spirit of reparations.

The LiftOff Residency takes place at NDA's studio in Tribeca and provides 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 Fall/Winter 2022-23 LiftOff Residency Artists are Morgan Amirah Burns, Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Ursula Eagly, and evan ray suzuki. The Spring 2023 LiftOff Residency Artists are Juan Jesús Guiraldi, Alison Kopit, Julie Mayo, and Shannon Yu/SHA Creative Outlet. The LiftOff panelists are Mia Martelli, Nicholas Rodrigues, x, and Alexa West.

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, and individual donors.

Alexander Diaz is an independent artist born and raised in the Bronx. Diaz is a graduate of the University of The Arts in Philadelphia and the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program. Diaz began their training with the Bronx Dance Academy and the Bronx Dance Theater. They have had the pleasure of working with nathantrice/RITUALS, Sidra Bell, Christal Brown's INSPIRIT, Fredrick Earl Mosley, Sara Shelton Mann, and is currently a member of Maurya Kerr's tinypistol. Diaz was recently awarded a 2022 BRIO award (Bronx Recognizes Its Own Award) from the Bronx Council on the Arts.

North Carolina-based Ayan Felix is a Gulf Coast-bred movement artist, dreamy storyteller, and cultural organizer. They perform Southern Black American cultures of excess, slowness, and dirt indoors and under dusky skies. Independently, they have birthed live performances for Barnstorm Dance Festival (Houston), Kuumba Dance Fest (Houston), and the Houston Fringe Festival. Their site-responsive and collaborative practice with spirit, co-conspirators, and the environment has produced screen dances shown at the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance, freeskewl (NYC), and the Black Endurance Community Series at The Movement Lab ATL. Their MFA thesis production How to avoid gas stations and other shit I want to do at night (2021), is also documented in a paper, we, present in space: Queer Performance Cultures of Transience and Care Based in Black Feminisms, as the culmination of the MFA experience through the Duke Dance Program. Felix has joined the dance legacies of SUCHU Dance/Jennifer Wood, Pilot Dance Project, Andrea E Woods-Valdés, and Dance Afrikana. Collaborations ongoing and past include time with SLIPPAGE performance lab, jhon r. Stronks, Brittany J. Green, and Ivy Nicole-Jonet. They also co-host queer burlesque experiences with Les Bimbos in Raleigh, NC.

Miriam Parker, born in New York City, is an interdisciplinary artist who uses movement, paint, video art, and sculpture/installation. Her work has been influenced by her experience as a dancer, her study of Buddhist phenomenology, and her connection to the free jazz tradition. Parker is a Monira Foundation artist resident at Mana Contemporary. In 2021 she received a Toulmin Fellowship from Center for Ballet and the Arts and National Sawdust in collaboration with Marisa Michelson. Parker has performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, Fridman Gallery (NY), at a residency at Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), Every Women Biennial (NY), Survey Dover Plains (NY), the Vision Festival, Satellite Art Fair (Miami), and had a monthlong residency at Governors Island in the House of Poetics curated by Cooper Union, among others. She is co founder and collaborator of Lost Voyage, a multimedia collaborative work led by seven women artists. Lost Voyage explores human relationships with displacement, haven, and metaphysical constructs through a communal experience. They have performed in NYC at WhiteBox, Five Myles, and Roulette Intermedium.

2022-23 LiftOff Residency Artists

Morgan Amirah Burns, originally from Atlanta, is a 22-year-old Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist. She is a 2020 graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dance. In her own creative practice, filmmaking and dance unite to provoke emotional curiosity about how we humans move through the world often in conversation with elements of the natural

world. Burns's creative pursuits have been recognized by GALLIM with a Moving Women Residency and by the Consulate General of Canada in NYC with the support and creation of her collaborative film spring promise FUTURES (2021). She is currently the inaugural recipient of the Merce Cunningham Trust Barbara Ensley Award. As a performer, works such as Retrofit: A New Age (2022) by Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Reiner have pushed her further down paths of performance art and site-specific research. Her most recent site-specific performance was in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Kilo Kish with their work Still Dreaming as a part of Time Square Arts Council x Womxn in Windows. She is excited for an exploratory period of development, collaboration, and creation in residence at the New Dance Alliance.

Maxi Hawkeye Canion, originally from El Paso, TX, is an improviser, durational performance/movement artist, and director based in Brooklyn. They are currently working on a multidisciplinary series titled A Titan in Flesh. As with most of their work, this series focuses on improvisational research and embodying impermanence. Collaboration is integral to their productions and they love to incorporate their interests in sculptural garment designs, sound chambers, and textural sets. Through durational trances, Canion processes their experiences inside the dream sequences these interests craft to invoke dialogue around identity, intimacy, and these newly imagined worlds. In performance, they dive through transformative states to conjure their history and lineages to create visually transporting work.

Ursula Eagly is a dance artist who has been based in New York City for more than 20 years. Her works are characterized by a "rabbit-hole logic" (The New York Times), and she researches physical experiences that are not conventionally regarded as material for choreography: the autonomic, the psychosocial, the perceptual. Eagly is also active in the field as a performer and writer.

Juan Jesús Guiraldi is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and performer born in Buenos Aires in 1988. He graduated with a degreee in choreographic composition, dance, folk dance and tango at the Universidad Nacional Del Arte of Buenos Aires. He is artistic director of Movimiento Constante, a platform for research on body movement and of the post-graduate school EME (Especializacion,

Movimiento, Experimentacion) of Buenos Aires. Together with his dance company UNA CONSTANTE, he is promoter and director of the annual FESTIVAL CONSTANTE, which has taken place in Buenos Aires since 2014, bringing together artists from around the world.

Alison Kopit is a queer and disabled multidisciplinary artist and access worker creating at the intersection of movement improvisation and conceptual art. She is interested in the unquantifiable and undocumentable imprints that care leaves on our bodyminds. For her LiftOff residency, she will be working on a series called Reverberations that explores the potentialities of care through the lens of ephemerality and dynamic interpersonal connection. She invites the community to loosen its grip on time and space and dream expansively about the ways that we can reach toward one another. Kopit holds an MS and PhD in disability studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was a 2021-2022 resident of Dance/NYC's Disability. Dance. Artistry residency program and a participating artist in UCLA's 2022 Dancing Disability Lab. As an access worker, she embraces anti-oppressive approaches to cultural work, working with artists, collectives, and organizations to build commitment to intersectional, sustainable access practice. The depth of her experience comes from relationship and engagement with queer and disability communities. Mutual aid practice, arts organizing, access practice, direct care, and collaborative art-making are central to her art practice and life.

Julie Mayo is a choreographer and teacher in New York whose performance works foreground body-level communication that is familiar yet simultaneously intelligible and inexplicable. Mayo's works hinge on the inseparability of the comic and the tragic, the ordinary and the remarkable, and the individual and the collective. She has been commissioned by individual artists for solo performance projects and teaches somatic and performance practices through Movement Research and her own teaching platform on Zoom. Mayo was a 2020-21 Gibney DiP (Dance in Process) resident artist, a 2017-18 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, and a 2014-15 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks artist. She is the recipient of residencies at UCross Foundation, Djerassi, Yaddo, Mount Tremper Arts, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Mayo's work has been presented in New York by The Chocolate Factory, Gibney, The Kitchen (Dance and Process), Movement Research at Judson Church, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, JACK, Dixon Place, and Target Margin Theater. Currently she is working on a new piece for Roulette coming in June 2023.

evan ray suzuki is a dance artist and designer of Japanese descent originally from Whidbey Island, WA, and now based in Brooklyn. suzuki creates multidisciplinary projects across butoh, dance, theater, and film/video and has presented work at Ars Nova, JACK, Abrons Arts Center, La MaMa, The Tank, Triskelion Arts, CPR, and many parks and basements. suzuki works as a performer with David Neumann, Mina Nishimura, and gorno (Glenn Potter-Takata). Some current research interests include the sociocultural influence of new media (memes), the choreographic embodiment of natural landscape, and the performance of detachment. suzuki has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Shannon Yu 余香儒 is a Brooklyn-based artist from Taiwan. Yu holds an MFA in performance and performance studies from Pratt Institute, and a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from National Taiwan University. Yu practices breaking, hip-hop,

contemporary floorwork, and Wing Tsun martial arts. Space, sound, movement, texture, and imagery inspire Sha's work. Yu identifies as a

multidisciplinary artist, dancer-choreographer, queer creator. Yu is the founder and creative director of SHA Creative Outlet, and has shown work at Abrons Arts Center, La MaMa, Judson Memorial Church, Triskelion Arts, the Landmark Loew's Theater, and has had residencies with the Center at West Park, Dance in Bushwick, Spoke the Hub, and Chen Dance Center. Yu has taken part in the Performance Mix Festival, the Evolution Festival, and Your Moves Dance Festival.

About New Dance Alliance

Incorporated in 1989, New Dance Alliance (NDA) is a performing arts nonprofit. Its mission, from the earliest days, has been to support experimental movement-based artists. In recent years, the organization has shifted its focus, making an explicit commitment to equity and inclusion, creating

programs centering the work of artists from historically marginalized communities. NDA provides 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. Its main programs are Performance Mix Festival, NDA Studio Programs (Black Artists Space to Create Residency, LiftOff: Residency and Workshop, Satellite Rehearsal Space, Work Sessions), and projects created by interdisciplinary artist and performer Karen Bernard.

Collectively, these programs support the work of more than 100 experimental artists and bring in 2,500 audience members each year.

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