Returning Choreographic Fellow Miguel Gutierrez will be coming to MANCC for his eighth MANCC residency since 2006, and second as part of MANCC’s Archive Residency Program, to further develop his latest dance project: Super Nothing.

While at MANCC, Gutierrez will be working with collaborators including performers from New York and Los Angeles, Jay Carlon (LA), Justin Faircloth (NYC), Wendell Gray (NYC), and Evelyn Sanchez (LA), lighting designer, Carolina Ortiz, and composer, Rosana Caban on Super Nothing, which brings forth many questions about art-making. How do the dynamics of an art-making process reflect or deny the dynamics of life outside the studio? When world-building is part of your artistic project, what material makes it into that world? Whose story gets told and whose story gets put aside? As Gutierrez notes, bell hooks writes, “Moving, we confront the realities of choice and location.” Thinking about movement in both the dance and geographic sense of the word, Gutierrez’s piece engages with our ideas about place/home, time, history, and the strength and failings of “community.”

MANCC’s Archive Residency Program provides artists with the opportunity to work with creative process documentation and materials in the MANCC archives that they have accumulated over multiple residencies, thus giving the returning artists the chance to use these materials in the way they deem most useful for their current creative practice. Gutierrez is MANCC’s third Archive Residency Fellow since the program began in 2020.

Super Nothing will premiere at New York Live Arts in January 2025 as part of the 23-24 Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist program.

This Archive Residency program is made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation.

Returning Choreographic Fellow Miguel Gutierrez came to MANCC as MANCC’s third Archive Residency Fellow in September 2023 and will be returning in Fall 2024 with his performance collaborators for the second of his two residencies as a Fellow. A pilot and singular initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation, this program offers artists who have accumulated considerable creative process documentation in the MANCC archives, through multiple residencies, the opportunity to work with these materials in ways they deem most useful for their current creative practice.

During Gutierrez’s two MANCC archive residencies, he and his collaborators are examining questions of archive, memory, and how context moves us into relation with ourselves and each other. How does the present re-shape our view of the past? How does the past tell us something about how bodies are changing? By toggling the lens of attention between the past and the present, this project serves as a form of research for Gutierrez into how both our perception of being together and our understanding of what bodies/people are and do is profoundly changing.

Kristen Juarez, an archivist and senior research specialist for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute joined Gutierrez remotely in his first archive residency in Fall 2023 to review footage and images from his five MANCC residencies between 2006 – 2015 (each supporting the development of new work, four works in total). This work helped seed the planning for his second residency in Fall 2024 for Untitled, his new project. Untitled will engage performers from New York and Los Angeles - Justin Faircloth (NYC), Wendell Gray (NYC), Ajani Brannum (LA) and Evelyn Sanchez (LA) - in such questions that explore how the dynamics of previous processes appear with today’s lens, shaped as it is by current concerns of racial justice, climate crisis, and political division.

Returning Choreographic Fellow Miguel Gutierrez came to MANCC to develop Age & Beauty Part 2: Asian Beauty @ the Werq Meeting or The Choreographer & Her Muse or &:@&.  The work is the second installment in a suite of queer pieces that addresses the representation of the dancer, the physical and emotional labor of performance, tropes about the aging gay choreographer, the interaction of art making with administration, the idea of "queer time," futurity, and mid-life anxieties about relevance, sustainability and artistic burnout. The piece uses retrospection and archive to trouble what Walter Benjamin calls “the hellish return of the same,” to demonstrate how relationships, money and flights of fancy are at the center of all art making, and to create a blueprint for the future.  Gutierrez was previously in residence in January 2014 to develop Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/, a work in which dancer Mickey Mahar was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance Award, aka a Bessie.

While at MANCC, Gutierrez met with Modern Languages and Linguistics Professor, Dr. Enrique Alvarez, who had attended a showing and provided feedback for Age & Beauty Part 1 during Gutierrez’s previous residency. The Scholarly Entrypoint allowed the two to delve further into the themes and context of these first two works in the artist’s planned trilogy.

Gutierrez also taught a workshop for School of Dance and Theatre students, faculty and community members. The workshop, Queer Choreographies: Whatever the Fuck That Means. A decomposition workshop, provided an opportunity for participants to examine the meaning of performance that identifies as "queer,” through their own movement explorations.

During the residency, the role of understudy Sean Donovan was developed to include him as a full member of the cast, assuming the character previously played by Gutierrez. Along with the expansion of Donovan’s part, time at MANCC allowed for further experimentation and refinement of the text, movement and production elements.  

At the end of the residency, Gutierrez and collaborators shared work-in-progress material in an informal showing. The post-showing discussion allowed audience members representing a diverse FSU faculty landscape (Dance, Theatre, Art History, Religion, Fine Arts) to provide feedback on the in-progress material that they had just seen. A discussion also ensued around the opportunities and challenges of building creative work in the current performing arts landscape.  

This residency was made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Miguel Gutierrez returned to MANCC to develop the first part of a new suite of queer pieces titled Age & Beauty. The project deals with the challenge of being a mid-career artist and the attendant questions of longevity, sustainability, aesthetic signature and burnout.

While at MANCC, Gutierrez developed movement vocabulary, original sound and text for Part 1 of the series, a duet with Mickey Mahar. Part 1 will premiere during the Whitney 2014 Biennial where it will be shown multiple times in one day. Gutierrez simulated the performance at the Whitney by running the piece three times a day for multiple audiences. The first two showings were attended by students and faculty from the FSU Schools of Dance and Theater. Actors and artists from Tallahassee, along with scholars from across FSU, gathered for the final showing of Age & Beauty, which was followed by a post-show discussion. After the final showing Gutierrez engaged the audience in discussion about the ideals that are established by age and beauty and his exploration of the futurity of his own work. 

Age & Beauty premiered during the Whitney 2014 Biennial April 23- May 4, 2014. 

This residency was made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Returning Choreographic Fellow Miguel Gutierrez partnered with Returning MANCC Media Fellow Alex Ketley to continue the work Ketley began with No Hero, a dance project using video, music and live performance to document dance across the Pacific Northwest, including rural localities. To continue the research in examining dance outside the studio and concert stage, Gutierrez and Ketley traveled south, spending nearly a month traveling through Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, exploring what dance and concert dance means and can mean to rural communities. Performers Michelle Boulé and Sara Woods joined Gutierrez and Ketley during their travels.

As in No Hero, the project uses dance as the prism to study the beauty, confusion and economic and social stratification that shapes the diverse American landscape. The choreographers and collaborating artists later returned to MANCC to develop the new work and FSU’s Ringling Museum’s Historic Asolo Theater hosted the world premiere in 2015.

This residency was funded by the inaugural Princess Grace Foundation Choreography Mentorship Co-Commission Award.

Gutierrez returned to MANCC for the second of a two-part residency focusing on the production and finalization of his evening length piece, And lose the name of action. The piece is the performance result of three years’ worth of research into the over-lapping and divergent conceptions of mind/body in the fields of neurology, embodied philosophy, somatic practices, improvisation, and the paranormal. The six performers came together to form an incongruent family and create a moving scéance for the 21st Century. Inspired by Jorgen Leth’s film The Perfect Human, the elusive logic of dance improvisation, philosophical quandaries about the brain, and the 19th century spiritualist movement, And lose the name of action draws connections between the analytical and the unexplainable, grappling with the limits of language and the ever present specter of death. In reference to this work, Gutierrez writes, “My work has always looked at the ways in which we look for meaning and location in the world, and with this new project I hope to articulate these questions in the most complicated and sophisticated way yet.” ??

?This residency focused on the final production logistics, including lighting, staging, and set design. Experimenting with projections, parachutes, and risers, Gutierrez and his collaborators used the residency as a means to put the finishing touches on the piece’s intricate set design along with showing the work in progress to a live audience followed by a dialogue session.

And lose the name of action premiered at the Walker Art Center ?September 19-21, 2012.

This residency was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Gutierrez returned to MANCC in the first of a two part residency to work on a new evening length piece, And lose the name of action. The piece is the performance result of three years’ worth of research into the over-lapping and divergent conceptions of mind/body in the fields of neurology, embodied philosophy, somatic practices, improvisation and the paranormal. In reference to this work Gutierrez writes, “My work has always looked at the ways in which we look for meaning and location in the world, and with this new project I hope to articulate these questions in the most complicated and sophisticated way yet.”

In both content and form, Gutierrez conceived a series of innovative Entrypoints and modalities of creative research, which reflected the cross-disciplinary scope of his current work. While in residence, he conducted interviews with imminent scholar Dr. Richard Shusterman, Director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University, as well as FSU faculty in the Philosophy and Neuroscience departments, gave a lecture on the origins of the new work, hosted an INEFFABLE INTANGIBLE SENSATIONAL workshop for students, engaged in extensive studio-based research, and moderated a "Mind/Body Problem" panel discussion with the wider Tallahassee community.

This residency was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Gutierrez divided his time between the movement, audio, and visual investigation for Everyone and the staging of his solo myendlesslove. Gutierrez sought to find a new mode or sensibility for his work in which the performance serves as an experience, a condition or situation which houses the audience and performers, rather than a presentation or product for consumption. Community was invited to participate in Gutierrez’s experience-based exercises, and to observe and discuss work in progress showings of both pieces.

Myendlesslove premiered at MIX NYC: The Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival in October, 2006.

Everyone premiered at Abrons Arts Center in March, 2007.