Returning Choreographic Fellow Beth Gill came to MANCC for the fourth time to continue developing her work Nail Biter.  In this new work, fantasy and imagination act as powerful liberating catalysts for creating new selves and futures. It brings to life otherworldly characters, amalgamations of Gill and her dancers, that speak across culture lines to a collective unconscious. Reaching towards science fiction and ancient myth, Nail Biter’s characters communicate visually through archetype and metaphor.

Nail Biter is a three-year project co-commissioned by Fisher Center at Bard, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Walker Art Center. This single creative process spanning 2021 – 2023 will produce three related, site-responsive presentations culminating in a large-scale proscenium production.
 
While in residence at MANCC, Gill met with FSU Art Professors, Rob Duarte and Carolyn Henne, who spoke with Gill to work through technical considerations of the material elements she was investigating, namely body casting and robotics. Gill also hosted a sharing of the work in process and discussion with members of the FSU School of Dance Faculty.

This residency is supported, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Returning Choreographic Fellow Beth Gill came to MANCC for the third time to begin development of her new, currently untitled project. Her first MANCC residency in 2013 was as a Hatchery Project Artist to develop New Work for the Desert; her second residency in 2016 furthered her work on Catacomb. Since these projects she’s gone on to premiere two additional works, entitled Brand New Sidewalk and Pitkin Grove.  This new, untitled work is an opportunity for Gill to extend her choreographic reach by integrating her diverse practices into a single rolling dreamscape, presenting dance as a liminal entity bridging spectacle, ritual, physical theater, drama, and sport.

Diving into the beginning of a three-year work cycle after coming out of a highly productive period that saw her develop a full evening length work every year from 2016 to 2018, Gill now continues to ask, “How can I engage in a process of working that doesn’t just turn over every year or two?” Reflecting on and selecting which ideas from past processes to carry forward, she spent her time at MANCC concentrating on the experience of being in the room with individuals. While at MANCC, she also spent two days working with FSU School of Dance senior undergraduate and graduate students to further her research in the studio. On the process, first year M.A. candidate Scott Lindenberg wrote, "Working with Beth Gill liberated me from expectations about beginning a creative process as I've seen them in other, primarily academic, settings. She demonstrated rigor in looking for a kernel of her idea in whatever way it manifested during our participation in her process."

This residency was supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Sustainable Arts Foundation also provided funding to support Beth Gill as a parent artist.

Beth Gill returned to MANCC to work on Catacomb, which is a new site-specific performance installation inspired by archetype, the imagination and the subconscious. As she is conceiving of the project, a symbiotic pair with a mysterious and ever-present bond, a lone heroic female, and a glowing, otherworldly presence inhabit a dreamlike, sensory-rich world that draws the audience into an immersive act of witnessing.

While in residence, Gill worked on creating an intimate, surrealist space, building on the formalism of her past several works (Electric Midwife, New Work for the Desert), while forging new psychologically driven terrain through explorations of role, the gathering and layering of meaning and being, and, ultimately, disappearance. Gill is influenced by the architecture of the space in which her work is situated and used a scaffold to demarcate the verticality of the walls as well as illustrate the final audience’s elevated point of view on the work.  She also focused on movement creation and worked with longtime collaborator Jon Moniaci on the development of an original sound score.

As a means of exploring the themes in her work, Gill hosted an informal focus group during the first days of the residency. The curated group included representatives from Florida State University’s Psychology & Neuroscience, Dance, Theater, Visual Art, and Communications departments.  After viewing an excerpt of the movement material, Beth oriented the audience around her interest in their impressions of the work: How did they organize and categorize the bodies? What associations did they make about the performers and their relationships? Their varied responses, from the vantage points of their disciplines, contributed to Gill’s investigation.

Catacomb premiered at The Chocolate Factory in May 2016.

Bessie award-winning choreographer Beth Gill had her first MANCC residency in December 2013 with support from the Hatchery Project for a concentrated research period to develop New Work for the Desert.

At MANCC, Gill worked with the full cast and sound designer, Jon Moniaci to create a vast space in which the body struggles through form, gesture and contact to express something real and fictitious, old and new, foreign and familiar.  Gill invited a group of faculty and scholars to view the work at the onset of the residency alongside poet and NY Times critic Claudia LaRocco in efforts to push the work forward from the beginning of the residency.

In ArtForum, LaRocco described the experience in her top list of 2013. “As part of the residency, [Gill] did the inevitable in-process showing. This one was notable for being interrupted by an emergency alarm (apparently brought on by a misfiring steam machine): It happened right in one of the quietest, stillest sections of a quiet and still dance. So, we got to see it again, after an impromptu intermission on the lawn out front. Architecture. The edifice. Sun on palm fronds. The slow laborious movement of the maker, the liquid embodiment of influence. Bodies as archives, the kind that don’t keep. Get thee to NYLA in March.”    

New Work for the Desert premiered at New York Live Arts on March 20-22, 2014.

This residency is part of The Hatchery Project, a collaborative residency initiative with The Chocolate Factory  (Long Island City, NY), RED Arts Project (Philadelphia, PA), Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL), and Vermont Performance Lab  (Guilford, VT) and is made possible with major funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.