It’s always amazing and amazingly difficult to narrow down the Alembic Cohort from the many intriguing artists and applications we receive, and PWNW thanks jury members Emily Jones, Danielle Ross, and Takahiro Yamamoto for dedicating their time to going through the artists’ materials and engaging in fruitful discussion. And we thank all the artists who applied for taking the risk to throw their hat into the ring!
And now, we introduce the artists!
JmeJames Antonick has been in deep-movement collaboration with Patsy Morris while working with musician Geovanny Vega since 2021. Through Jme’s vision, they explore ideas of collective and ethereal concepts in the body through somatic dance and performance. The three of them have created Trash Babe Productions, a dance and sound collective. Jme finds inspiration within the body through somatic practices that include contact, levity, play, and magic. Jme’s approach comes from connection to the body mind, knowing that healing and repatterning begins in the nervous system and also how the body responds to life and systems of oppression, self relationship, interpersonal relationships, micro and macro community, and beyond. https://trashbabeproductions.com/
During the Alembic Residency we will be exploring and developing the third and final part of a three part series. This series focuses on healing in our collective and individual trauma created by the pandemic now stored in the body, in hopes to craft an experience and container for healing. In this series we explore accessing healing through our bodies with three approaches; touch, play, and magic.
Part 1, Honey Touch at FLOCK Dance Center, explored healing and regulating via touch. Part 2, Lantern Consciousness, at New Expressive Works Residency. Explored accessing neuro plasticity through movement and play. Part 3, at The Alembic Residency, will focus on magic in our bodies. We will dive in somatically to research what happens in the physical body when we partake in rituals, spells, altarwork, etc.
Katherine Longstreth’s work begins with a question and the answer takes the form of a dance, video or installation. Does the process of making a dance leave a trace and can I make that visible? How can the viewer be more aware of their own body while engaging with the work? She often uses ordinary props and costumes in ways that animate them to build an intimate relationship revealing layers of meanings in which a box is a box, and also a clock, pillow, incubator, package, baby and gravestone.
Her work has been presented in New York City by the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Broome Corner, Context, Dance Theater Workshop, David Parker/The Bang Group, Dixon Place, Movement Research, Performance Mix, and the 92nd St. Y; and in Portland by Conduit, Ten Tiny Dances, the Risk Reward Festival, The One Festival, The White Box and Reed College. She was born and raised in Manhattan where she began dancing at the 92nd Street Y. Her work has been funded by the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts in Culture Council, the Independent Artist Challenge Program, and the Institute for Studies in New Arts. http://www.katherinelongstreth.com/
I am grateful to have the space of the Alembic Residency to develop a piece which looks toward an imminent future fully entangled with AI. I am fascinated and scared about what these advancements mean for humans, so the urgency I feel around this is not simply a creative urgency, but an existential one as well.
Emma Lutz-Higgins is a performer, choreographer and teacher. Her work uses physicality and narrative to transform space into playgrounds for exploration. She is interested in narrative as a device for tracking the dancers as they navigate unknown terrain in their quest for transformation. It is through this layered world building that Emma investigates the relationships that are most consuming to us. And how to find specificity within them.
Raised in Montpelier, Vermont Emma has been relatively bi-coastal her whole life, spending extensive time with her extended family in the San Francisco Bay Area. She lived in New York for 8 years before the West Coast called, moving to Portland in January of 2021. While working as a freelance dancer in New York City she had the opportunity to perform at Danspace Project, Movement Research, Live Arts, SLAM, Triskelian Arts and Gibney Dance. She is currently creating a Dance Composition class that will be offered at Flock Dance Center in the coming months. Emma graduated with a BA from Bard College majoring in Dance with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
I am obsessed with clarity. I want to rearrange until it is perfectly clear that of course this dance belongs here. I want to rearrange my words to devastate you. I want to rearrange until I find every version of right that could exist. I want to wreck my dance and pick up the pieces, holding them in my hands until I know where to place each part. I want to make it right and for a moment experience the bliss of seeing it all fall into place. The paradigm shift that happens when everything where is should be. This is my quest. The dance I am making is called You Make Me Sick. This dance is a party. This dance is alone in a room when the party is over. This dance is about the secrets we keep from each other and the secrets we have with each other. This dance is the end, just you and me the bobbing balloons. I do not need to rearrange. This dance is about how you make me so sick.
(lovesick over you.)
Performance Works NW || Linda Austin Dance 