Scion 21

Scion Residents

We are so excited to welcome Nancy Hohlbein Louis Millard* as the Scion resident recipients this year. They will be exploring and developing creative practices and processes around their chosen theme June 1st - August 31st. Through their practices they will be developing movement, scores, and choreography as ways to embody their theme. We will be updating their themes, intentions, and actions as they shift during their creative process. They will be mentored during their residency by Mauriah Donegan Kraker, Rebecca Fitton, and Benjamin Cheney. Mauriah and Rebecca will do most of their mentoring via zoom, but each will be at The Croft for a week. At this time they will get a chance to engage with Nancy and Louis socially distanced and in person.

*Louis Millard is unable to join us this season.

Nancy Hohlbein

Project Theme: Sleep & Dreams

Project Intentions: To explore dreams and the state in between awareness and dreaming.

Louis Millard

Project Theme: Joints

Project Intentions: I intend to explore what it would be like if I was an inanimate object that had joint.

Mentors

Mauriah Donegan Kraker

August 1st - 8th

mauriah donegan kraker is a midwesterner, a collaborative performance maker, a walker, improviser, teacher. she is an advocate for slow travel: walking around the block and through the city as a means of attending to choreographic unfolding of time cycles in the body + land.

mauriah holds a bfa in dance from uw-milwaukee and an mfa in dance from the university of illinois at urbana- champaign, receiving the vannie l. shiery memorial dance scholarship for outstanding performance, the wanda m nettl prize for student choreography, while serving as the director of the children’s dance community program (2016- 2019). she has toured and taught at universities and cultural centers throughout the us and europe, teaching movement workshops that draw on sounding, walking, improvisatory, and outdoor practices.

mauriah’s background in athletics (competing as an olympic-level athlete, touring with pilobolus dance company, and being raised in a family that walked and biked everywhere) is a driver in the creation of physical works that live somewhere in the realms of dancing and walking. she has led folks on site walks through the italian alps, sound walks in southern france, and outings to highway underpasses and prairies in the midwest- the walks culminating in participatory scores and dance performance. 

for the past decade, mauriah has worked with wild space dance company as a dancer and an artistic associate. in 2018, she danced alongside jennifer monson, premiering the critically acclaimed duet bend the even at the chocolate factory in long island city. she currently writes and makes dances about place and endurance with her long distance collaborator, leah wilks. find her near the milwaukee river (potawatomi, ojibwe, ho-chunk, menominee lands) where she is serving as an artist in residence of the milwaukee river greenway.

Rebecca Fitton

June 6th - 13th

Born in England and raised in the woods of Wisconsin, her work as a community member and participatory artist is largely informed by her experiences as a multi-cultural immigrant.

She primarily works in non-traditional spaces including bars, grocery stores, rooftops, gardens and streets across New York, New Jersey, Florida, Wisconsin, and Salzburg, Austria. Her work has been presented in New York City at ShowDown/Gibney, Open Performance/Movement Research, Chez Bushwick, Staten Island Arts, Triskelion Arts, LiVEART.US at the Queens Museum, Abrons Arts Center, LEIMAY, Performance is Alive/SATELLITE ART SHOW, and EstroGenius. She has been an artist in residence at Center in Grand Rapids, MI, a LEIMAY Subsidized Fellow at CAVE in Brooklyn, NY and a participant in Hemispheric Institute's EMERGENYC program. She received a 2020 New Work Grant from Queens Council on the Arts to present re______, an immersive performance, film, and reflection space presented through Zoom and USPS that explored her belated learning of Asian American history, reclaiming archival processes, and captioning interventions. She shares an ongoing, trans-Atlantic movement practice with Kayla McClellan, @kinected_connected.

Fitton holds her administrative work as an integral aspect of her artistic process. Since 2017, she has worked as the Community Engagement Coordinator for DELIRIOUS Dances/Edisa Weeks. She currently works as an independent arts manager for Will Rawls, J. Bouey, and 2nd Best Dance Company. Fitton holds virtual space bi-weekly with the six Steering Committee Members of FAILSPACE, a collective of artists working to dismantle oppressive structures within teaching practices. She was a member of Dance/NYC’s Junior Committee from 2018-2020 and acted as Secretary from 2019-2020. She served on panels for Dance/NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund and Triskelion Art’s 2021 Artist-in-Residence.

As a performer, Fitton has worked with Hannah Schwadron, Abigail Levine, Adrienne Westwood, JACKS, Nathaniel Hendrickson, Renegade Performance Group, Rina Espiritu, Alex Ketley, and Rodger Belman.

Current curiosities: regional arts policy, neoliberalism and the NEA, neuro-divergence, captioning interventions.
Always curiosities: Asian-American-immigrant-English-queerness-and-deep-intergenerational-healing.

Benjamin Cheney

Benjamin Cheney is a 32 year old performer and designer from Northern Michigan. He is the founder and Artistic Director of The Croft Residency. His personal dance practice centers on moving meditation, with a focus on somatic, intentional, and metaphoric improvisational movement. He uses the tools of Body Mind Centering (BMC) and the Tamalpa Life Art Process (TLAP) as lenses and languages to engage in his explorations and facilitations. His performances include the New York premier of Bienvenue, with Company SBB in New York in May 2017, The Nutcracker with Crooked Tree School of Ballet in 2018, and a performance at Mass MoCA with Dance The Yard on Valentine’s Day 2019. His most recent work with an artist residency program was at The Yard as the Production associate, in 2016, facilitating the onsite needs of incoming artists in residents for performance. He was also an artist educator while at the yard, facilitating classes in schools, senior homes, and at community venues.