re:FRAME

re:FRAME

re:FRAME is a time-limited artist-initiated collective experiment between five New Orleans-based choreographers: Ann Glaviano, Jeremy Guyton, Meryl Zaytoun Murman, Ryuta Iwashita, and Shannon Stewart investigating the solo form and an artist-driven model for creative exchange and sustainability.

re:FRAME believes in the potency and promise of a radical reimagining of what dance includes and how dance can be funded, developed, and shared. Commonly, the five artists value embodied research, integrated community processes, the interrogation of complex social issues, and multidisciplinary ways of working, in unconventional relationships to space. re:FRAME invites communities to join in movement and discourse setting studio research and collective-building alongside (and against) social, political, and cultural landscapes. As a collective, re:FRAME seeks to address the regional lack of access to dance infrastructure in the Gulf South and to uplift New Orleans dance artists. Through this experiment, the collective aims to explore and share a model for cooperative practice—one that supports learning with and from each other, and that will be passed along through skill-sharing to another cohort of dance artists in New Orleans.

Ann Glaviano is a writer, dance-maker, DJ, and native New Orleanian; since 2013 she has directed the New Orleans-based performance project Known Mass, which is an ongoing collaboration between dancers and artists of mixed disciplines, aesthetically and ethically motivated by devised-theatre and DIY performance traditions.

Meryl Zaytoun Murman is an Arab American artist juxtaposing choreographic, cinematic and live art practices; most recently creating for Eyes Walk Festival and Dimitria 56 (Greece), The Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), The Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, MI), and in 2024 in/on the Mississippi River as a McKnight International Choreographic Fellow (Winona, MN.)

Ryuta Iwashita, after 25 years of living in Japan improvises and lives their life in Bulbancha where they share their works of performance art as well as their life research called SOTAI, which centers embodiment and deep rest of ancestral bodies.

Jeremy Guyton is a Los Angeles native and a core artist with several New Orleans dance and theatre companies; his work has been presented at the Sydney Opera House with Solange, and in collaboration with CERN, the astrophysics lab at the Franco-Swiss border.

Shannon Stewart was born in the South and came of age as an artist in the Pacific Northwest; a 2023 USA Artist nominee, she/they make work for stage, screen, and galleries that has been presented throughout the US and Europe, including Tulane University and DOCK 11 Berlin, and was slated to appear in 2020 at the Kennedy Center.

Visiting Artist Collective | Dec 1-Dec 16, 2023

Visiting Artists Ann Glaviano, Meryl Zaytoun Murman, Ryuta Iwashita, Jeremy Guyton (FSU, MFA, 2022) and Shannon Stewart together make up re:FRAME. The self-organizing group of five artists came to MANCC from December 1 to December 16, 2023 to further develop their own individual works, which are at various stages of development. In addition, the artists co-examined and processed their collective organizing (stretched over 5 years due to the global COVID-19 Pandemic) towards uplifting and sustaining dance-making, originally with a focus on New Orleans and the Gulf South.

While at MANCC, re:FRAME continued to look to choreographic research as a vehicle to reframe their sense of perception, modes of being, and co-existing, believing in the potency and promise of a radical reimagining of what dance includes and how dance can be funded, developed, and shared. Commonly, the five artists value embodied research, integrated community processes, the interrogation of complex social issues, and multidisciplinary ways of working, in unconventional relationships to space.

During their time at MANCC, Glaviano, Stewart, Iwashita and Zaytoun Murman presented showings of their works-in-progress that were open to the public. Additionally, Iwashita and Guyton each taught a class to FSU’s School of Dance students to engage with the students and get and give further insight into their research. Ryuta taught a Contact Improvisation class, infused with their life research called SOTAI: Ancestral Body, and Guyton taught jerkin’, the south L.A. social dance style that gained national recognition in the early 2000s.

In addition to the five visiting artists in the collective, re:FRAME collaborated with Sebastian Tsifis, a performance artist, filmmaker and linguist, Xotchil Musser, designer, and Melanie Greene, choreographer, dancer, and this residency’s Embedded Writer.

New Orleans-based choreographer and writer Greene joined the re:Frame artists for three days as part of MANCC’s Embedded Writer program to explore the collective’s history and to consider the idea of publication around re:Frame’s cultural advocacy work.

The Embedded Writer Program is supported by the Mellon Foundation.