PWNW enthusiastically introduces our 2024 Alembic Parent Artists, one local and one visiting, each of whom receives studio time plus a stipend to help with childcare and/or any other life expenses. Muffie Delgado Connelly, our Portland-based artist, will be in residence at PWNW from June 1, 2024 through March 31, 2025. Heather Kravas, from Seattle. will be in residence July 8-19.
LOCAL ARTIST MUFFIE DELGADO
Muffie Delgado Connelly (she/her) is a dance artist, movement researcher, teacher, and somatic practitioner in Portland, Oregon. Her work as a performer and choreographer has been presented across the United States over the course of three decades. She performs in film, on stage and in backyards. Her artistic engagements run the gamut from working with friends, to independent choreographers to large scale production companies. She has won residencies both in her home lands and abroad. Her movement studies have carried her to far away places, and taught her how to engage with dance through various cultures, languages, religions and belief systems.
She has many long standing artistic collaborations, including those with Tahni Holt, Annie Novotny, Ruth Nelson and Leslie Cuyjet. She is experienced in many somatic and movement modalities, and uses these forms as a way to explore therapeutic systems for art making and community care.
Delgado Connelly’s movement work is part of her activist practice, and in both arenas she is informed by her identity as a Chicago-born Xicanx mother. She believes in dance and body work as strategies for fostering resilience and resistance, and seeks to make dance and engage in somatic practices that build community.
My current research process is interested in the ways that bodies transmit information and how performance processes (or works) can be systems of support and care. This process meets at the intersections of movement, artistic creation, therapeutic care and community building. Inside of this process, the work I plan to do as a part of the Alembic Parent Residency, will be a stepping stone towards the creation of a new performance work.
VISITING ARTIST HEATHER KRAVAS
Since 1995 Heather Kravas has investigated choreographic, improvisation and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the limits of choreography and her artistic abilities. Punk, feminist, precise and extreme, her work is continually built, wrecked and reconstructed to activate curiosity and examine relationships between art, power, agency and desire.
Kravas grew up in Pullman, Washington, homeland of the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) Tribe and Palus people, where she studied ballet and the experimental theories of Grotowski. Significant to her understanding of dance as a relevant form are the many artists and teachers she has been privileged to study with and/or work beside, including: Marina Abramavic, Marion Ballester, DD Dorvillier, Neil Greenberg, Dayna Hanson, Victoria Haven, Okkyung Lee, Nina Martin, Antonija Livingstone, Yvonne Meier, Dean Moss, Tere O’Connor, Mary Overlie, Janet Sassoon, Joan Skinner, Stephanie Skura, Deirdre Wilson and Hannah Wiley.
Her work has been presented in partnership with numerous local, national and international venues including: American Realness, Base, AUNTS, City of Women (Ljubljana), The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dance Theater Workshop (now New York Live Arts), Festival Transamerique (Montreal), Fusebox Festival, Movement Research, On the Boards, Oxbow Gallery, Onassis Institute (Athens), Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, Walker Arts Center and Velocity. Support includes fellowships and grants from Guggenheim Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MapFund, National Performance Network, Creative Capital, 4Culture, Seattle Arts Commission and the Rauschenberg Residency Foundation.
Heather lives with her partner and two children in Seattle, on the un-ceded, ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people, specifically, the Duwamish People.
My choreography is a never-ending exploration of
lines
shapes
distances
anger
ecstasy
exertion
endurance
exhaustion
calamity
contradiction
concentration
tension
failure
sacrifice
labor
love
+
words
I create movement-based performances to discover ways to activate curiosity and spend time with others in unusual ways. My dances are hard. Hard to make, hard to do, hard to watch. With occasional soft breaks and funny exceptions. Houses for our labor – this is choreography where effort is the subject and method of the work. In them, the seemingly shocking is stripped of spectacle while the physically uneventful mushrooms into something fierce and tender. I am interested in paring away what feels decorative, in search of touching something deeper and less recognizable to myself.
Performance Works NW ||Linda Austin Dance 