"Part of Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation

featuring Miguel Gutierrez, S. Ama Wray, Amy O’Neal, Taja Will, + more

Join us in an informal glimpse into the research and work of SFD+I 2022 RESEARCH Module faculty, all some of the most recognized names in dance nationally.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Miguel Gutierrez [he / him] is a choreographer, performer, music maker, writer, video artist, educator and Feldenkrais Method practitioner based in Lenapehoking, currently known as Brooklyn, NY. He makes performances to create empathetic and irreverent spaces to talk about things in complicated ways beyond the limitations of propriety, party lines, and conventional logic. He has presented his work internationally in venues including the Wexner Art Center, REDCAT, Festival d’Automne/Paris and American Realness. He has received four New York Dance and Performance Bessie Awards, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, and he was a selected artist for the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

For over 30 years, S. Ama Wray [she/her] has been performing, teaching and choreographing across 3 continents. With London Contemporary Dance Theater and Rambert Dance Company she toured Russia, China, USA and across Europe. As the Artistic Director of JazzXchange Music and Dance Company she was Artist-in-Residence at The Royal Opera House and Southbank Center, UK. Wray now also pursues ethnographic research and the Comparative and International Education Society presented her with the 2018 African Diaspora Emerging Scholar Award. Her current work encompasses knowledge embedded within African and diasporic performance practices.

Taja Will [they/them] is a queer, chronically ill, transnational adoptee; a ritualist, educator, performer, choreographer and Healing Justice practitioner. For Taja, the foundation of Healing Justice lives in the practice, pedagogy and performance of dance improvisation and cultural somatics. This lineage is led by queer, trans, disabled and BIPOC folks, it is radical care work and essential for interdependence. They hypothesize these conditions create generative, alchemical, magical and virtuosic spaces for contact + improvisation to emerge. Taja is a current Jerome Hill Artist fellow, and is based in southside Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce, ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe.

Amy O’Neal (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator merging contemporary and hip-hop dance since 2000 to challenge notions of race, gender, and the sampling nature of creativity. From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, multidisciplinary video, music, and hybrid dance company based in Seattle. From 2010 until now, she creates work centering people and practices of hip-hop and house dance culture while acknowledging her position to Blackness as a cis white woman. O’Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts among others. After 20 years in Seattle, O’Neal moved to Los Angeles in 2016 joining the the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018 where she teaches hip-hop, house, composition, improvisation, contemporary, and lectures on Black social dance culture history and media literacy." (Promo Copy)