The Croft Residency

The underlined names of artists are linked to either their website, a website that has their bio, or their instagram page.

During our residency, The Croft offered us a space for regeneration, constructive rest, discourse, dreaming, and completing an old cycle to begin anew. We were nurtured by the abundance of space to move and breathe in, ample access to local food, and the support of space without the requirement of producing an outcome. Through our unstructured time we had creative insights about our future goals as collaborators, we had hard conversations about the work we have done together and what is next, and we allowed ourselves the proper time needed to mourn the ending of a creative cycle after a particularly intense project came to a close. Although it feels too close to know where or how this creative research will manifest in the future, our time at The Croft feels like the initial seed that has been planted in a rich soil where it will germinate. On our last night as artists in residency, after a week of listening to our bodies asking us to do less, we felt ourselves burst into a spontaneous dance on the deck, in between a rising moon and setting sun. 

During the residency, Megan Mazarick worked with collaborators Alonzo Magsino and Tyler Rivera to start building a new trio, Soapbox (working title). This work deals with power dynamics and explores the idea of hierarchical thinking with movement and rhythmic text. Much of Megan's choreographic process is improvisation-based and derived from the looping of words and attaching thought to actions. The aim of the residency was to work on small vignettes that dive into character, abstract narratives, and tight improvisational structures. As a part of their residency together, Megan, Alonzo, and Tyler had an informal sharing on the dance deck.

As a duo, our shared practice has centered freedom, choice, and play, exploring how a loose structure can turn into something tangible and meaningful once we include an outside audience. We often investigate our own relationship with each other, and the interplay of codependence and interdependence. Our practice also integrates accessibility into creative development, across captioning, audio description, and spaciousness for the needs that chronic pain and varying ability bring to dancemaking.

At The Croft they worked towards detangling some of that familiarity - teasing out how they could become unfamiliar to each other, finding moments of difference within similarities or sameness, attempting to find ways to both bridge gaps and burn bridges. They had an open studio at the Horton Bay Schoolhouse as part of their practice.

Our current work-in-process, parts, is a multi-episode transdisciplinary performance and film project. It began as a duet in 2019, has expanded to include more performance and design collaborators, and is being made into a short film as well. Our collaborators on this project create and devise movement and text; sound, visual, set, and media design; archival materials; and conceptual ideation.

In parts, we explore the distortion of movement, flesh, objects, materials, sound, and digital content to transcend heteronormative constructions and reductions of intimacy. This distortion is both a site for collective pleasure and a mechanism to defamiliarize what is known. Through defamiliarization, potential for new knowl[edges] emerge – new bodies, new images, new significations. The hope is that through this play with perception we might make space for the liberated self.

Time at The Croft allowed them to galvanize more cohesion across the disparate materials of movement, text, set, and sound designs as they developed the full evening-length work. They shared methodologies and improvisations through a work-in-progress with community members. They spent a lot of time envisioning ways to be in gift-exchange with the land.

Jamie’s project explored body schema in the environment. Centered around philosophical values from deep ecology and phenomenology, she will underwent a daily practice of listening to and identifying with the natural world. This practice will include sensation-based meditations, physical interactions with natural objects, and mirroring natural beings to incorporate them into an ever-expanding idea of Self. These actions served as a reminder of a shared and interdependent existence between humans and the natural world. Her daily engagements with the land at the Croft accumulated a collection of physical states and movement which she will incorporated into a score by the end of the residency. This score had several functions; it will be a continued communication with the land, a sharing of her discoveries, an act of care, and a personal archive to better integrate her research into her embodied memory. She shared some time in support of the Scion residents during her residency. She presented her score at the Water is Life festival in Petoskey.

Moving Spirits, Inc is a contemporary arts organization dedicated to performing, researching, documenting, cultivating, and producing arts of the African diaspora. Africanistic aesthetics heavily influences our company's repertory. Our work blends modern, ballet, African diaspora dance forms,  and contemporary West African dances.

We believe that the creative arts should be used as a vehicle to bring awareness to injustices and obstacles impacting our communities. Moving Spirits' artists dedicate themselves to evolving social change through dance performances and community engagement.

Description:

During their time at The Croff, Moving Spirits investigated and researched African American culture and heritage through Ring Shout movement narratives. This project included rituals that honor nature including movement offerings, songs, and rhythms. Movement sharing with our feet connected to the earth, libations to honor those who came before through movement and gestures will occurred daily on the land premises. The dancers shared a workshop and a presentation of their work with the dancers at The Crooked Tree School of Ballet.