Chez Bushwick offers three-month residencies dedicated to fostering the creation, development, and performance of new work by both emerging and mid-career choreographers. Artists in residence are provided rehearsal space, monthly peer forums, and a culminating performance to support the creative process.

 

Woman-In-Progress – Catchweight/Glass Heart

Catchweight/Glass Hearts examines relationships, power, and protean nature of love.  Shifting between intimacy/distance, exposure/protection, security/danger, this duet examines how willing we are to sacrifice ourselves to be with another. Can vulnerability coexist with self-preservation?  Can we escape the traps we create for ourselves?

Implementing partner improvisation, boxing, butoh-infused and contemporary dance forms, performers explore relationships through demanding physical feats, use of space, and extracted writings.  While balancing on ladder’s edge and squeezing between the structures and their shadows, dancers throw punches, embrace, and fight an invisible opponent. Catchweight/Glass Heart assembles broken pieces of memory, imagination, and present reality to form an abstract narrative of love and misunderstanding.

Choreographer: Kelly Buwalda
In collaboration with Daniel Krstyen
Performed by: Kelly Buwalda and Daniel Krstyen

Tumblr page: kellybuwalda.tumblr.com
Twitter: @dancingbuwalda

  

Marc Crousillat – Naomi

Naomi is a movement practice attempting to embody assumed movement vocabularies of other cultures, people, and politics depending entirely on the body’s associations for immediate translation. Throughout, gestures happen “auto-correctively”, as if the body is unable to decide on a landing; a place of complete identification. A flamenco dancer, a bodybuilder, the history of modern dance, a 7-year-old girl living in Hialeah, ritualism, or the President of Iran can all be potential candidates in the assumptions of their physicality, not their beliefs. Placing the body in an inquisitive state over one of intense virtuosity slides it away from a traditional use of dance training and towards the desire to be more blatant in the intention of the embodiment of human forms- disregarding outward legibility. The body will move, embellished and not, text will be involved tying together the abstract and the narrative, and the dance will rub up with how the contemporary body is possibly moving today.

Choreographer and performer: Marc Crousillat 

 

 

Motley Dance – Duck and Goose

Interdisciplinary performance event Duck and Goose examines the othering of mothering. In collaboration with her dance artists (Meredith Fages, Lea Fulton, Ariel Lembeck), Director Elisabeth Motley explores the synthesis of her creative practice with mommy-dom, and inquires if both aspects are in fact synonymous or overlapping. Through engagement with children’s toys, recyclable and non-recyclable objects, nursery rhymes and song the artists create a choreographed and live sound score.

Duck and Goose investigates the multiplicity of the word imprinting, exploring the patterns and behaviors of ducks and geese, as well as the societal preoccupation to leave behind an indelible mark. The work discusses the permanency and non- permanency of the footprints we make on earth and asks if it is possible to unmake a mark. By questioning why some of us itch to create in the version of human beings and others do not, as well as the dark isms that reside within the sweet confines of nursery rhymes, Duck and Goose encourages an evolving dialogue surrounding the role of women.

 

Choreographer: Elisabeth Motley
In Collaboration with Meredith Fages, Lea Fulton, Ariel Lembeck
Performed by: Meredith Fages, Lea Fulton, Ariel Lembeck & Elisabeth Motley

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MotleyDance

 

Eli Tamondong / Projectile Imagery – Feast or Famine

“Feast or Famine” is a solo dance piece loosely inspired by Vicente L. Rafael’s literary work “White Love and Other Events in Filipino History.” Struggling with themes of fetishization and colonized bodies, this dance attempts to challenge American defaults of racial and ethnic identity in queer attraction and relationships.

Choreographer and performer: Eli Tamondong
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/projectileimagery