Micaela Taylor and Company Cap Musco Center Residency With Public Performance Next Month

The Marybelle and Sebastian P. Musco Center for the Arts at Chapman University continues its 2021-22 Season of Reopening with dancer-choreographer Micaela Taylor and her TL Collective dance company performing three original pieces Sunday, September 26, beginning at 7 pm.

In the five years since Taylor formed The TL Collective ("To Love"), the group has become one of the most celebrated in the United States, and their appearances across the country have drawn critical praise and sold-out performances. For their Musco Center debut, they will perform three original works including Drift, which explores an individual's evolving relationship to self, and '90Sugar, a whimsical look at young adult life in our hyper-paced millennial world.

Tickets are available now at muscocenter.org or by calling 844-OC-MUSCO (844-626-8726)

Taylor and company's Musco Center debut performance comes at the end of her weeklong 'Next Dance, Leap of Art Residency,' during which they will be fully embedded with Chapman's Department of Dance for a week of classes. Beginning Monday, September 20 while they tech new dances for national tour, they will teach Chapman dance students and share with them their experiences as professional dancers in one of America's most celebrated young troupes.

"It's such an honor for the Musco team to help engage more than a hundred of our dance students with an ascending star whose work so effusively captures what's next in dance today," said Musco Center Executive Director, Richard T. Bryant.

One of Dance magazine's "25 to Watch" in 2019, Taylor draws from the full spectrum of dance, classical to contemporary, to create work that emanates "a subtle spirituality" with "a choreographic voice that resonates across dance genres."

Following a 2019 performance of Drift at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, a LA Dance Chronicle said, the work "was full of beautiful movement phrases that crashed and fell apart, as well as weaving from chaos into brief unison phrases that told us that we all share in the drifting from one emotion to another."

A Los Angeles native trained at Marat Daukayev School of Ballet and Los Angeles County High School of the Arts, Taylor earned her BFA in Dance from Seattle's Cornish College of the Arts, whose other celebrated alumni include both Merce Cunningham and Robert Joffrey. She is now an artist-in-residence at USC's Glorya Kaufman School of Dance.

Taylor was honored with the first Springboard Danse Montreal EMERGE Choreographic Award in 2018. The prize included a commission to choreography a piece for New York's Gibney Dance Company. That resulted in Eyesow, which premiered in Gibney's 2019 season.

Taylor has been credited with work that beautifully fuses together her training in Hip Hop with contemporary modern dance to create a unique vocabulary that often speaks louder and more powerful than words.

"The movement language she works with has a very fresh quality ... a quirky sense of individuality," Jennifer Stahl, Dance magazine's editor in chief told the L.A. Times.

Her individual movement style of hip-hop combined with contemporary technique has led her to find a new way for people to move which is best described as Contemporary/Pop. ArtsMeme wrote that her "street-meets-stage vocabulary explodes with energy."

"A subtle spirituality emanates from her dances through an intuitive musicality that utilizes syncopation and counterpoint," wrote Candice Thompson in Dance Magazine. "Yet, even in fast, complex phrases of movement and gesture, Taylor and The TL Collective surprise in their ability to come together in virtuosic unison."

Musco Center will provide a rare expansive performance space for Micaela Taylor and The TL Collective to show what has made them one of LA's - and the nation's - fastest rising dance companies.

Tickets are now on sale at www.muscocenter.org or by calling 844-OC-MUSCO (844-626-8726).

Coming next in the Musco Center Presents 2021-22 Season is Punjabi singer-songwriter Satinder Sartaaj on Sunday, October 3, The Chapman Orchestra & University Wind Symphony in Concert on Friday, October 15; and Kishi Bashi in Concert on Saturday, October 23.

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