Laurie Van Wieren

Laurie Van Wieren

Laurie Van Wieren grew up on the west side of the city Chicago where her Swedish and Welsh ancestors landed in 1900. She has been a dance maker, curator and teacher of the Twin Cities community in Minnesota for more than 30 years. Her solo and ensemble choreography has been shown nationally as well as in Germany, and Russia. Van Wieren has curated performance for the Southern Theater, Ritz Theater, Bryant Lake Bowl Theater, and Soo Visual Art Center. She has developed work for the Walker Art Center’s Open Field performance, which highlighted 100 local choreographers. Van Wieren's 16-year run of the acclaimed 9x22 Dance/Lab, a monthly showcase, was a performance platform for local and visiting choreographers. Her choreography has been a recipient of fellowships & grants from the Jerome Foundation, Bush Foundation, NEA, Rockefeller Foundations, Minnesota State Arts Board and The McKnight Foundation. Van Wieren has received a Special/Citation Sage Award, a Sage Award for Outstanding Performance, and a City Pages “Artists of the Year” for her solo improvisational dance: Temporary Action Theory. She has been choreographing a series of seasonal site-specific ensemble dances at Silverwood Park since the spring 2016. During the pandemic her work was seen on the Mississippi River and in Silverwood Park under a full moon. Van Wieren's future work includes a series of improvisational solo's considering the histories of her ancestors.

Partnership Project: McKnight Artist Fellow | April 6 - 16

Remote Sensing/ Collecting Our Past

Minneapolis-based artist Laurie Van Wieren will come to MANCC for the first time to develop her current and ongoing project, Remote Sensing/ Collecting Our Past, which is an investigation of the interaction between the body and the landscapes in which they exist, historically and in the present moment.

In partnership with her two collaborators, dramaturg/dancer Kristin Van Loon and visual artist Alyssa Baguss, Van Wieren will be creating new solos and duets that explore migration patterns and layers of movement of the body and the landscape while paying attention to what they carry with them in navigating these pasts and futures. Their creative process will include researching the interaction of maps made by hand and body with mediated maps of their ancestral homelands, created by Baguss as objects and set pieces with which Van Loon and Van Wieren will interact. Together, they will consider the yearning for the homelands that their ancestors left behind while acknowledging the context of this time of COVID, and their struggle to come to terms with: their racism; living on stolen land; and the swamp of environmental exploitation. While in residence, Van Wieren also will meet with FSU scholars in the Department of Art and Geography to expand her research concerning methods of map making and sculptural applications for her work.

This residency is supported, in part, by a partnership with McKnight Choreographer Fellowships, funded by The McKnight Foundation and administered by The Cowles Center for Dance & The Performing Arts.