NICOLE WOLCOTT
Director

Nicole Wolcott is a Brooklyn based movement artist and teacher. In 2003 she co-founded KEIGWIN + COMPANY and was the Associate Artistic Director until 2013. She continues to work with Keigwin on a myriad of independent projects, including their recent online collaboration for Guggenheim Works and Process and ‘Bolero Juilliard’ (broadcast on PBS ‘Great Performances’) She directs ‘The Well’, a dance theater production house she founded in 2018 that is rooted in a collaborative process, generating performances endemic to the artists that create them. The throughline of her independent creations of the last twelve years is the artistic collaboration with sound designer, philosopher and friend Omar Zubair.  Rooted in improvisation, they create hyper-live dance theater performances with whimsy and aplomb.  Wolcott has been in show business for over thirty years. This fact astounds her.  In that time she has danced in the rural and the chic, she was even once a cultural diplomat for the United States through DANCE USA dancing with Ethiopians, Tunisians and Ivorians; learning more than she taught. She has helped create dances for Broadway, Off Broadway, a major motion picture, an international art rock band, for shows at The Guggenheim, The Kennedy Center, The Joyce, The American Dance Festival, and even CBGB’s.  She has been in the ensemble and she has been the star.  She loves dance.

Ideas regarding craft, collaboration and composition will be proposed, explored and discussed. What works for us? What do we cast off? What do we want to experiment with and explore more? While verbal discussion is valued, GLUE is rooted in practice and communication through doing. Wolcott will facilitate improvisation, process, and performance classes for the first day in order to find a common language and a springboard for our time together.

HANNAH GARNER
Artist Facilitator

Hannah Garner (she/her/hers), recently named ‘25 to Watch’ by Dance Magazine, is a white, queer, non-disabled, female-presenting dancer and dance-maker whose dance theatre work “tackles topics like death and queer identity through rigorous, inventive movement and wit” (Dance Magazine). Having graduated SUNY Purchase with a BFA in Dance Performance and Composition, minor in Arts Management, and semester at the Beijing Dance Academy, Hannah has gone on to work with Doug Varone & Dancers, Raja Feather Kelly, Sue Bernhard, and Megan Williams, in venues such as The Joyce Theater, NY City Center, the Park Avenue Armory, and New York Live Arts. Her work as 2nd Best Dance Company has been commissioned by GroundWorks DanceTheater, Gibney’s ‘dance-mobile’ series, Triskelion Arts, Kizuna Dance, GALLIM x CreateArt, musical artists (Snail Mail, Frankie Cosmos, and Half Waif), Hartt School, and SUNY Purchase, among others. In addition to her performing work, Hannah finds a creative home in teaching: from creative movement classes for young children in Chinatown to technique classes for retired professionals in Connecticut, to teaching contemporary technique and composition to the pre-professional students at SUNY Purchase’s Conservatory of Dance to leading high schoolers with no dance experience in Fort Hamilton through movement generation, Hannah’s teaching practice continues to change and grow. Hannah is currently on the contemporary faculty at Gibney Dance Center and often guest teaches at Peridance Center and SUNY Purchase. 2nd Best works in person in NYC and lives online at 2ndbestdance.com

This 2 day shared practice will be an exposure (...the good kind) to my creative process. You will be invited to try on the approach to movement generation I use when creating material for my work (which is an unsettling yet endearing blend of many things that I often describe as: physically rigorous, sometimes virtuosic, and almost always slapstick dance-plays).

My work… 

-believes in art-making that is exploratory, empathetic, and goofy. 
-values feeling over reality and seeks our truest sensations over absolute truth.
-blends humor and tragedy while grappling with big ideas in very human ways (aka messy ways). 
-plays very seriously and invites audiences into that play.

In rehearsal my collaborators and I play out absurdist scenes: we move, perform text, sing, utilize props, unconventionally handle proscenium spaces, and ask the audience to play active roles or even perform in the work alongside us. The unpredictability of live performance excites me, as does building a nexus between dance and text, humor and tragedy, viewer and performer. We tackle big topics, play very seriously, and lean into hunches that take us to uncertain and often ridiculous places all to ask: what does it mean to be alive?

KAYLA FARRISH
Artist Facilitator

Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts is an emerging company combining filmmaking, storytelling, dance theater performance, and sound score. The company has been commissioned by Gibney Dance Inc (2020-2021), Louis Armstrong House Museum (2020),  Danspace Project Inc (2019), Pepatian and BAAD! (2018), and beyond. Farrish has been supported by creative residencies including Gallim Women + Residency (2021),  Gibney Spotlight: New Voices, Barysnikov Arts Center, Arts On Site (2020), Keshet Makers Space Experience, BAX Space Grant (2019), Pepatian Dance Your Future (2018), and Chez Bushwick (2017). Pieces sprouted outwards including "Black Bodies Sonata", "The New Frontier (my dear America)” evening length and film, "With grit From, Grace", "Spectacle” Film and Live Production evening length work, and anticipated "Martyr's Fiction" (2021) that continued to push boundaries of form, voice, scene, narrative in an array of cinematic mediums. In 2020-2021, she has been commissioned for choreographing and directing a range of films and live performance hybrids.  Her work has been performed at venues like Judson Church, Danspace, Jacob's Pillow,  New York Live Arts,  Joe’s Pub,  BAAD!, film festivals, and beyond.  In 2021  she created site-specific immersive,  “Broken Record” duet commission, with Brandon Coleman for Little Island Festival, “Rinsing” short dance film, co-directed Melanie Charles “Y’ll D’nt Care Abt Black Women” Film,  Saul Williams’ “People Above the Moon” Solo for The Motherboard Suites at NYLA, “Roster” Outdoor Concert Performance collaboration Four/Four Open Air Series with Melanie Charles, and Martyr’s Fiction Feature Film. In 2022, she will be releasing her feature film “Martyr’s Fiction”, creating new solo works with Belinda McGuire and herself, collaborating with Kenyon Adams, Symphony Space, and creating commissions for companies. 

She’s received grants and support including Sundance Uprise Grant for Emerging BIPOC Directors, Dance Films Association Production Grant, Film Residency and community support from Little Falls, NY, and Brooklyn Filmmaker Collective Mentorship Fellowship. She was awarded a Bessie Performance Award for her solo “People Above the Moon” in NYLA’s “Motherboard Suite”. NY Times named “Roster” Top 2021 Dance Performances, and titled Farrish a “Break Out Star of 2021”. She was listed on Dance Magazine “Top 9 Screen Dance Makers to  Watch” as well. 

In addition, Farrish has freelanced with companies including Sleep No More NYC, Kyle Abraham/AIM, Marjani Forte/7NMS,  Kate Weare Company, Helen Simoneau Danse, Company SBB, Dendy/Donovan Projects, Arthur Aviles,  Rashuan Mitchell/Silas Reiner, Nicole Von Arx, Danielle Russo, and others. She has also been an instructor, rehearsal director, performance coach, and mentor both through dance companies and independently. She has been adjunct faculty for NYU Tisch Dance and SUNY Purchase College. She has taught and rehearsal directed at Juilliard, University of the Arts, NYU, Marymount College, University of NC School of the Arts, Alonzo King Lines Training Program, New Dialect, and others. She is currently a rehearsal director at Sleep No More NYC.

Kayla loves to build slippery dreamscapes, scenes, and narratives that weave through our feelings, experiences, and relationships as we allow them to unfold, move, build, and deconstruct. We will move through honesty, discovery, and questioning. Often combining form, filmmaking, writing, and sound score, to explore what is possible. We will play by empowering instinct, failure, curiosity, being lost in games, developing scores, mixtures of mediums, and phrase material. Dream on….understanding the rules to break them… This process is a playground for the imagination, leaving nothing out, affording the imagination to be open and know when the language of the work finds its voice. To call out and be heard.

In GLUE Kayla shares her interests in developing her process to be more open to trusting movement and the gut to formulate choreographies that unfold in an organic trajectory of discoveries to ultimately create a vision or experience.  She wants to be released from knowing the direction from the outset.  She invites unabashed wildness and more fantastical scene work with changing environments/scores. She embraces the mixture and cross pollination of film, music video, photography, and scripts. She embraces the unknown

J. BOUEY
Improviser

J. Bouey is out here doing their best, damnit! Currently moving on pandemic timing and prioritizing rest, J. is finding their way back to joy.

J. is the founder of The Dance Union Podcast, a recent 2021-2022 Jerome Fellow, and is a 2022/2023 Movement Research Artist in Residence. J. Bouey was most recently a Gibney Spotlight artist, Artist-In-Residence at CPR – Center for Performance Research, and 2021 Bogliasco Fellow. J. was also a 2018 Movement Research Van Lier Fellow, and 2018 Dancing While Black Fellow. They were also a former dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and danced with Germaul Barnes’ Viewsic Dance, Maria Bauman’s MB Dance, Dante Brown, Christal Brown’s INspirit Dance, and apprenticed with Emerge 125 (formerly Elisa Monte Dance) under the artistic direction of Tiffany Rea-Fisher.

Determined to manifest the dreams dreamt in their youth, J. is assuming this responsibility because these dreams sustained them when the sun didn’t shine or shined too bright to see.

 In this class, we will become one with the music. By listening to music like musicians, and allowing our bodies to be our own musical instruments, we can discover new possibilities within our current dance practices. This class will be most beneficial for people who confidently move within, through, and without dance "techniques" as this is an improvision-based practice greatly influenced by Punking and Waacking performance practices. All expressions of movement are encouraged to participate. Let's JAM!

JENNIFER NUGENT
Improviser

Jennifer Nugent has been performing in NYC since 1999, most notably with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company from (2009-2014), David Dorfman Dance from (1999-2007), and Paul Matteson (2002-2020). Her practices are profoundly inspired by Linda Rogers Albritton, Ann Cummings, Patricia Cummings, Beatrice LaVerne, Bambi Anderson, Dale Andree, Gerri Houlihan, Daniel Lepkoff, Wendell Beavers, Lisa Race, David Dorfman, Patty Townsend, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Paul Matteson, and Janet Wong, Nugent is a teaching artist at Sarah Lawrence College, Gibney Dance NYC,  and the virtual platform freeskewl. 

How do we witness each other in motion? What is a warm up? How does movement become the language in which to express ourselves? What are we hearing and how do we explain? What does movement do and what can it become? While improvising, how do we practice our unfolding ecology and dance for each other? I would like to focus our time together on exploring these questions - through the process of doing, exchanging and reciprocity. 

ERYN ROSENTHAL
Improviser

Choreographer, social practice artist and contact improvisation researcher Eryn Rosenthal investigates democracy and social fabric, dreams and meaning-making based on ongoing oral history research and collaboration with artists and activists in South Africa, Chile, Spain and the US. Her site-based performance series, The Doors Project, investigates transitions—historical, political, intimate—in different doorways around the world. Eryn currently teaches Dance and Democracy: Movement Improvisation and Liberation Pedagogies, and Making Performance on Socio-Political Questions at Yale University. www.erynrosenthal.com

In this site-based creation workshop, we’ll be connecting body, word, association and image toward mining the subconscious at this time of social and personal transition. Grounded in movement and the body, we’ll examine and integrate tools from both composition and improvisation: physical listening and co-creation; timing and scale; momentum and touch. Framing performance and site-specific creation as dialogue with the space around us, we’ll research relationships between our interior and exterior landscapes. This interdisciplinary workshop involves movement, drawing, writing, and play with dreams and objects.