Southern Theater Announces Winners Of 09 McKnight Artists Fellowships

The Southern Theater is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2009 McKnight Artist Fellowships for Choreographers and the McKnight Artist Fellowships for Dancers. Each Fellow will receive a $25,000 fellowship award.
McKnight Artist Fellowships for Choreographers:

Emily Johnson

Morgan Thorson

Vanessa Voskuil

In addition to the $25,000 fellowship stipend, each Choreography Fellow is eligible to receive support for career and artistic development.

McKnight Artist Fellowships for Dancers:

Sam Feipel

Justin Leaf

Karen Sherman

In addition to the $25,000 dancer fellowship stipend, the Fellowship Program will also provide funds for each Dancer Fellow to commission a choreographer of his/her choice to create a new solo dance work specifically for each Fellow. These new works, performed by the Dancer Fellows, will be premiered on a joint showcase performance presented at the Southern Theater July 8-11, 2010.
The Fellowship Program is designed to enrich and strengthen our community by acknowledging the accomplishments of individual choreographers and dancers and providing for their artistic growth.

This program is made possible by the generous support of The McKnight Foundation. The McKnight Foundation funds individual artist fellowships in 12 program areas.
Guidelines for next year's choreographer and dancer fellowships will be available later in the summer on the Southern Theater's website at www.southerntheater.org. 

Dancer Fellows:

Sam Feipel has been dancing tap, jazz and acrobatics since he was seven, starting ballet and modern when he was twelve. He has studied at the Central Illinois Ballet and the School of Ballet Chicago, and is frequently a guest artist for the Ketchikan Theatre Ballet of Alaska. Sam has been with the Minnesota Dance Theater since 2002.

Justin Leaf is a performing artist based in Minneapolis. Originally from Hagerstown, Maryland, Justin began his study of dance with Lauran Clowser and musical theater with Ruth Ridenour. He continued his dance training at Goucher College, Pacific Northwest Ballet School, and the Juilliard School, where he received his BFA in 2001. At Juilliard, he trained as a contemporary dancer and developed his skills as a choreographer, receiving the Zaraspe Prize for choreography. While in New York, Justin also worked closely with master teachers Andra and Ernesta Corvino. In 2002, Justin moved to Minneapolis to work with the James Sewell Ballet, where he spent seven seasons. In 2008, Justin began his work with Minnesota Dance Theatre, where he will return for a second season in August of 2009. During these years of immersion in dance, Justin has continued to explore his passion for music and theater. He has studied voice with Olga, Una Hardis, and Kenny Kiser. In 2003, Justin began to investigate how all of his beloved forms of expression could be incorporated into singular performance pieces. In 2006, this exploration led him to join with Brooke Aberlin to create the cabaret show Broadway Bound...and Gagged, which won a 2007 Minnesota SAGE Dance Award for Best Performance. With that production, Justin developed the character of Mistress Ginger and thereby added a new feature to his resume: drag artist. He has continued to incorporate drag characters into multi-dimensional, satiric performances pieces, frequently appearing on the Twin Cities cabaret circuit. In January of 2009, Justin founded his own performance company, Junkyard Theater, with the intention to have a consistent base from which to produce work. In March of 2009, Junkyard Theater presented The Mistress Ginger Junkyard Spectacular. The next production, Bedroom Eyes, will premiere in July of 2009 at the Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater.
Karen Sherman moved to Minneapolis in 2004 from New York City. As a choreographer, improviser, and dancer-for-hire, she seeks to embody the unconventional and to challenge expectations about dance as a form, including what it looks like and who should dance it. Her unusual movement choices and adventurous approach to performance have won her recognition from artists, audiences and critics across the aesthetic spectrum.

She has danced for and collaborated with numerous artists, including Sally Silvers, Clarinda Mac Low, Nami Yamamoto, Alejandra Martorell, Morgan Thorson, Hijack, Justin Jones, The Body Cartography Project, The Love Everybody Players, NYC's award-winning troupes Circus Amok and LAVA, and the feminist punk pop band, Le Tigre. She has trained in dance, movement, acrobatics, and music arts throughout the United States, and holds a BFA in Acting and Women's Studies (double major) from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She is also a singer, fifth-generation lasso spinner, and spent several years training in flying trapeze. All of this informs her work onstage.
She received a 2007 New York Dance and Performance Award (a.k.a., a "Bessie") for her work in Morgan Thorson's Faker, a 2006 Minnesota Sage Award for her performance work throughout the season, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul City Pages named her Best Dancer of 2007 and Best Choreographer of 2009. Her choreography been presented extensively in NYC and Minneapolis by P.S. 122, Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Dixon Place, chashama, The Southern Theater, The Walker Art Center, Red Eye Theater, The Bryant-Lake Bowl, among many others, and in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Montreal, New Jersey, Nebraska, Jacob's Pillow, and the streets of Paris. She was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2003, a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence in 1999-2000, a 2006 McKnight Choreography Fellow, and was recently awarded a 2009 Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship.

Choreography Fellows:

Morgan Thorson creates dances and movement-based projects with dancers, theater artists, and designers as core collaborators. Dodging a trademark style, her work address: the state of being (in general and within the context of the theater or performance site); her own personal relationship to dance; and the perception and representation of the body. Often at the center of her inquiry is an interest in the tension between the physical limitations of the body, the expansive nature of the imagination, and the emotional, social and perceptual currents generated by physical action. Each project-whether evening-length or shorter-is developed and edited through its own physical process and formula. Detail, humor, critique and formal concerns emerge, allowing the work to broadcast a social commentary beyond the work itself.

Thorson is a 2009 fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. Last season, Thorson was named "Best Choreographer of 2008" by City Pages, and received a 2007 Sage Award for Outstanding Choreography for Docudrama. In 2006, Thorson was awarded the Music in Motion commission to create No Feeling for Harmony and received a Sage Award for Outstanding Performance for her full-evening work, Faker. She has received fellowships from the McKnight, Bush and Jerome Foundations, and in 2004 she received The Bessie Schoenberg Memorial Fellowship to support her work at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, CA. Thorson has created many commissioned works for universities, companies and independent artists, including Lisa D'Amour, Split Britches Theater Company, Barnard College, University of Minnesota and James Sewell Ballet Company.

Thorson's work has been presented by venues worldwide, including Jacob's Pillow, The Kitchen (NYC), Performing Arts Group (Seoul, South Korea), LIP (London), and Link/Vostok (Yarislovl, Russia). In October, 2009, she will premiere Heaven, co-commissioned by the Walker Art Center, DiverseWorks in Houston, and P.S. 122 in New York City.

Emily Johnson is a choreographer/director/curator who works to make deliberate meaning, random association, and powerful movement the essential aspects of thought-provoking performances. Emily is originally from Alaska, is of Yup'ik descent, and is a shareholder of the Calista Native Corporation.
Emily regularly collaborates with musicians, visual artists, writers, and scientists to make work borne from joined creative forces. She takes her inspiration from the annual migration of salmon, who swim upstream for thousands of miles because they must. She has watched salmon swim up waterfalls and she believes humans can also be called to do amazing things. She has been told she makes dance for "the dance snobs" and for "people who generally don't like dance." She would like to think this is true; that her dances are for every body and that maybe they enlighten small aspects of our existence. "Out of respect for and trust in our bodies and collective memories, I give equal weight to story and image, to movement and stillness, to what I imagine and to what I do not know."

Johnson is a 2009 MANCC fellow and current Native InRoads fellow at the Loft Literary Center. She has been awarded a 2009 MAP Fund Grant and a 2009 Seventh Generation Fund Grant. Her work includes notable commissions from the Walker Art Center, National Presenters Network, and Franconia Sculpture Park, among others. She has been presented throughout North America, toured with SCUBA and NPN, and has self presented at DTW, Rogue Buddha Gallery, and the Que-Ana Bar. In 2009/2010 her work is presented at OutNorth (AK), PS122 (NY), LivingArts Festival (OK), FuseBox Festival (TX), and Pangea World Theater (MN).

Emily curates Windfarm, co-curates the dance-film series Capture!, and writes about contemporary performance in the online zine MentalContagion and in her own post-performance project, Post-re-View. Her website is www.catalystdance.com
Vanessa Voskuil is a performer, choreographer, director, teaching artist and co-founder/co-director of the artistic collaboration Live Action Set. As an independent artist residing in Minneapolis, MN, she has created over seventeen original works presented by theaters and universities throughout the twin-cites area. Voskuil is a recipient of a 2006 Sage Award for Outstanding Design for her production, The White Solos, and a Minnesota State Arts Board 2006 Artist Initiative Grant. Her work has been supported by the Moore Family Fund for the Arts of the Minneapolis Foundation and commissioned by the Southern Theater, Walker Art Center, Carlton College and Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theater. She has been recognized by the Star Tribune as an, "Artist on the Verge" (2007) among a list of artists to watch. www.vanessavoskuil.org

In 2003, Voskuil co-founded Live Action Set, a physical theater performance group dedicated to The Ensemble creation of original work through artistic collaboration and has gone on to receive recognitions including "Best Stage Production" and "Artists of the Year" by City Pages (2005), and "Outstanding Experimental Theatre" by the Star Tribune (2005). www.liveactionset.org
As a performer, Voskuil has previously worked with Minneapolis-based companies Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater, Catalyst Dances and Skewed Visions. She holds a BFA in Dance and a BA in theater from the University of Minnesota.

Southern Theater mission and artistic statement

The Southern Theater cultivates artistic exploration by providing a vibrant home for performance, fostering a multiplicity of voices and catalyzing connections among artists and audience.

The Southern presents and produces performance characterized by innovation and originality. We value connections to the local community and celebrate artwork that holds potential for transformative exchange. On stage, we are unyielding in our commitment to the highest levels of professionalism and artistic integrity.

For more information on the Southern, please visit www.southerntheater.org or call 612.340.0155

 

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