Axial 23

During Syd Lopez’s time at The Croft, they spent time with nature and with themselves. They studied the connections among physical being, nature, and emotional processes. They engaged in research with book from The Croft’s library. They helped prepare the space for the summer season by helping deep clean and turnover spaces in the residency. One of the specific projects that they helped with was designing and implementing a two week dry erase calendar. The calendar is for resident artists to be able to reference for happenings at or around The Croft. Syd also went to two community gatherings as a way to meet and engage with the local community.  

May 22nd - 31st

Smith Axial: Gabrielle & Maddy

While at The Croft, Gabi and Maddy worked on a collaborative emergent work. The work engaged with tasks, props, and the surrounding environment. The props that they engaged with included but were ont limited to packaging from the food that thy consumed while in residence, the Artistic Directors childhood beanie babies, and a battery powered weed whacker.

They were often joined in rehearsal by a Junco on the SW corner of the dance deck. On the day of their showing they discovered a litter of abandoned neonatal kittens in the ferns outside the residency. We were able to get them to a local woman who rescues such kittens. They shared their culminated work through an informal sharing on the dance deck. Following their sharing they invited the audience onto the deck to engage with the space and tasks that they witnessed within the sharing. Their bios and the burgeoning of their thesis research follows.

Gabrielle Revlock is an award-winning choreographer, performer, improviser, somatics educator and creator of Restorative Contact, a mindful touch-based movement practice. Her choreographic work depicts complicated but relatable interpersonal relationships, developed through meticulous character study and improvisational structures. During her residency at The Croft she will be researching habitus--the mostly unconscious ways that people or groups perceive the world and behave. She is inspired by the work of artist Pilvi Takala who through interventions and reenactments, displays people’s sometimes absurd or harmful assumptions. Revlock's research explores the intersection of nonsense and autoethnography. She is currently an MFA student at Smith College, in Northampton, MA.

Madelyn Sher is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and creative producer. She is currently an MFA Teaching Fellow at Smith College. Her choreographic interests include researching and combining disparate dance forms under the heading of contemporary dance; phenomenology and the embeddedness of human experience within ecology; and embodied rhythmic texture. She practices butoh, house, bachata, and contact improvisation in addition to modern and contemporary dance. Madelyn is a co-founder of Groundswell Series, an annual outdoor site-specific dance festival, which promotes public art as a vehicle for community engagement, arts appreciation, and environmental awareness.

While in residency I will be deepening my improvisational practice (both solo and with collaborator Gabrielle Revlock), with emphasized attention on the way that dancing outdoors affects my rhythmic and spatial choices. I will also be recording and layering sound scores on a cassette player, experimenting with ways to manually distort tape. I will also be initiating research for my MFA thesis project, which will include reading texts that deal with phenomenology, environmentalism, eco-feminism, and indigenous ethical perspectives. 

While in residence, Chloe Chandler (performing artist) and Jake Schraga (visual artist) explored what is, and can be, rested-recycled-renewed through the (im)permanence of life. They worked on exploring a different creative practice daily. While they were here that made a few short dance films, two of which were shared as a part of the Schoolhouse Sharing on Wednesday June 7th. They also created an installation for the sharing. A part of this install is pictured above. To get to this part of the install the viewer got to walk through a small hallway completely lined with assorted charcoal figure drawings. They spent much of their last day in residence decorating the vessel for their gift to the next artists.