Fall 2012 Artist Biographies
Nora Chipaumire was born in Mutare, Zimbabwe and currently lives in New York City. She has studied dance in many parts of the world including Africa (Senegal, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and South Africa), Cuba, Jamaica and the U.S. A graduate of the University of Zimbabwe's School of Law, she holds an M.A. in Dance and M.F.A. in Choreography and Performance from Mills College (CA).
Ms. Chipaumire is a 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow. She is also a two-time New York Dance and Performance (aka “Bessie”) Awardee: in 2008 for her dance-theater work, Chimurenga, and in 2007 for her body of work with Urban Bush Women, where she was a featured performer for six years (2003-2008) and served as Associate Artistic Director (2007-2008).
Her works include Visible (2011), commissioned by Harlem Stage and created in collaboration with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar for an international cast of independent performers; I Ka Nye (You Look Good) (2010), created and performed with choreographer Souleymane Badolo and musician Obo Addy; Silence/Dreams (2010), created and performed with Fred Bendongue and named one of the ten best dances of 2010 by the New York Times dance critics; lions will roar, swans will fly, angels will wrestle heaven, rains will break, gukurahundi (2009), created and performed with the legendary musician, Thomas Mapfumo (selected as Best Dance Concert of 2011 by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); Marriage between zones 3, 4 and 5 (2009) which premiered at the Flea Theater in NYC; Becoming Angels, (2009), a commission for Dance Alloy (Pittsburgh, PA); bismallah (2009), a commission for The Barnard Project (NYC); A Hidden Duet (2009), a collaboration with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; Poems (2007) an evening of solos; and Chimurenga, her first work to tour nationally. She is featured in several films, including Dark Swan (dir. Laurie Coyle, 2011); the award-winning, Nora (dir. Alla Kovgan & David Hinton, 2008); and the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa (a story of an art form in four acts) (dir. Joan Frosch & Alla Kovgan, 2006).
She is currently working on MIRIAM, an evening-length dance theater piece commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music for presentation at BAM’s Next Wave Festival 2012. For more information about this project, please visit www.mappinternational.org.
Beth Gill is a Queens-based artist, who makes contemporary dance and performance in New York City. She has accumulated a body of work that critically examines issues relating to the fields of contemporary dance and performance studies, through an ongoing exploration of aesthetics and perception. Ranging from short-term improvised structures to long-term choreographed performances, her work has been commissioned by The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, The Chocolate Factory Theater and Dixon Place as well as performed internationally.
Beth is a 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship recipient. In 2011 she was awarded two New York State Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and the Juried Award for the choreographer exhibiting some of the most interesting and exciting ideas happening in dance in New York City today. Her most recent work Electric Midwife was named one of the ‘Best Dances of 2011,’ by Time Out New York, as was her previous work what it looks like, what it feels like for 2008.
Beth is one of seven choreographers profiled in Michael Blackwood’s documentary New York Dance: States of Performance, which premiered in the Lincoln Center Dance on Film Festival in 2010. The documentary continues the focus of his two highly regarded previous documentaries: Making Dances: Seven Post-Modern Choreographers (1980) & Retracing Steps: American Dance Since Postmodernism (1988).
As a contemporary artist her work has received attention and fueled responses within academia. Most recently her work has been included and taught within the University of Illinois’ Dance Department’s curriculum, and published in MIT’s distinguished performance journal The Drama Review.
Gill’s mission is to use the experience of dance, theatrical design and sound within the framework of live performance to shift the way we see, sense and understand the space around us. Her choreographic body of work uses a timeless and rigorous investigation of form as an entryway into explorations of contemporary dance ideologies, which seek to reflect contemporary societal concerns.
Juliette Mapp is a New York based dancer, choreographer and teacher. Her teaching is influenced by her twenty-year study of the Alexander Technique both in England in the United States and her on-going studies of Kinetic Awareness with its creator, Elaine Summers. Juliette's somatic teaching is also inspired by her studies of Skinner Releasing with its creator, Joan Skinner. Juliette's teaching is catered to the individual student and she is invested in helping each dancer uncover their full physical and personal potential through movement. Juliette has taught throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. She has been on the faculty of Hunter College, George Washington University, Fordham University, and most recently was a guest teacher at Bard College. Juliette danced for choreographers Deborah Hay, John Jasperse, Vicky Shick, Jennifer Monson, Stephanie Skura, Orjan Andersson, Pat Graney and others. Juliette's choreography has been presented in New York at Danspace Project and the former Dance Theater Workshop, now New York Live Arts. Juliette curated the critically acclaimed 2010 Dancespace Project Platform, "Back to New York City". Juliette has received two New York Dance and Performance Awards (i.e. "Bessie's), one in 2002 for her dancing, and another for her choreography, in 2008.
Reggie Wilson (Artistic Director, choreographer and performer) founded his company, Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group, in 1989. Wilson draws from the movement languages of the blues, slave and spiritual cultures of Africans in the Americas and combines them with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he calls “post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances.”
His work has been presented nationally and internationally at venues such as Dance Theater Workshop, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), UCLA Live (Los Angeles), The Flynn (Burlington, VT), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Dance Umbrella (Austin, TX), Summerstage (NYC), Linkfest and Festival e’Nkundleni (Zimbabwe), Dance Factory (South Africa), Danças na Cidade (Portugal), and Festival Kaay Fecc (Senegal), The Politics of Ecstasy (Berlin, Germany).
Wilson has traveled extensively: to the Mississippi Delta to research secular and religious aspects of life there; to Trinidad and Tobago to research the Spiritual Baptists and the Shangoists; and also to the Southern, Central, West and East of Africa to work with dance and performance groups as well as various religious communities.
Wilson is a graduate of New York University, Tisch School of the Arts (1988, Larry Rhodes, Chair) He has studied composition and been mentored by Phyllis Lamhut; Performed and toured with Ohad Naharin’s NY-based company before forming his own Fist and Heel Performance Group. He has lectured, taught and conducted extended workshops and community projects throughout the US, Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. He has served as visiting faculty at several universities including Yale, Princeton and Wesleyan Universities. He is the recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance’s McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001). Wilson is also a 2002 BESSIE-New York Dance and Performance Award recipient for his work ‘The Tie-tongued Goat and the Lightning Bug Who Tried to Put Her Foot Down‘ and a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He has been an artist advisor for the National Dance Project and Board Member of Dance Theater Workshop. Most recently, in recognition of his creative contributions to the field, Wilson was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow and is also the 2009 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Dance.
His collaborative evening-length work, The Good Dance – dakar/brooklyn had its World premiere at the Walker Art Center in November 2009 and NY premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2009 followed by a ten city US tour. Presently he is working on theRevisitation an evening of works to be presented at New York Live Arts March 14th- 17th. His work (project) Moseses Project will be part of the BAM Next Wave Festival 2013.
