It’s always a pleasure to welcome a new cohort of Alembic Resident Artists and this year is no exception. Before introducing the artists, we want thank this year’s dedicated panelists: claire barrera, K.T. Kusmaul and Tere Mathern. As we had a larger pool of very deserving applicants this year, the panelist’s job was especially difficult, yet they considered all the applications with care and thoughtfulness. Thank you!
The chosen artists will be working in the studio, sharing ideas and progress with one another, and, next June, will present the results of their research and play.
AND NOW…THE ARTISTS!
sophia tweed ahmad is an experimental choreographer, performer & vocalist exploring the intersections of identity, ancestry and the body as a living constellation. A queer child of Pakistani and Norwegian diasporas, her art is informed by the confluence of her cultural and spiritual heritage. Her score-based choreography brews improvisation and raw reverberations in the body through prayer & vocal dynamics.
Her choreography has been presented by Ten Tiny Dances, Performance Works NW, Stripart Festival & Choreoscope Dance Film Festival.
“during this residency, I will be redeveloping my solo Inseparables into an ensemble with the support and labor of a handful of local artists. researching themes and practices that dive into dreaming, longing, clay bodies, vocal expression, connection within fragmented identities and bloodlines, entities that express portals; tea, tea cups & contact between bodies & inversions. “
Kye Kauffman Grant is a genre-fluid performance artist and producer working in experiential, collaborative, and embodied social art forms. Their training in theater, voice, dance, and music gives way to devised participatory public events intended to deepen our relationships to place, one another, and the moment. Projects have taken the form of a pedestrian parade with fifth grade crossing guards, the open-invitation dance ensemble Public Acts of Dance Company, a 40-person mall walk in a Portland shopping center, a Queens public access television show, and the cultivated pop persona, Jennifer Vanilla. They produce Club Alive, an interactive performance party, as well as Planet Lloyd, a free newspaper about Lloyd Center Mall supported by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
Grant was a member of experimental indie pop band Ava Luna for ten years before graduating with an MFA in Art + Social Practice from Portland State University. Their work has brought them to venues such as MoMA PS1 (NY), Museum of Modern Art (NY), Museum of Art and Design (NY), Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (OR), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR), The Apollo Theatre (NY), Joe’s Pub (NY), Irving Plaza (NY), Club Quarantine (WWW), and hundreds of others across the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Grant works as a voice actor, security guard, copyeditor, gallery attendant, adjunct instructor, assistant director for children’s theater, occasional contributor to the Portland Mercury, and visiting artist at PSU College of the Arts. kyealive.club
“Through costumes and props that codify and cartoonify the human form— magician’s gloves, traffic wands, rhythmic gymnastics ribbons, a drum sampler, balloons, a massage gun, resistance bands, jump rope, two trampolines— I’m exploring the chameleonic spectrum of ever-shifting trans embodiment and expression, using movement as an opportunity for dissociation, reassociation, and transmutation of narrative. I’m making a performance that is a music album, and a music album that is a performance: the music will inform the dance, the dance will inform the music, and the playing of the music itself will be its own intentional gesture.”
Kai Hynes is a performing artist and educator living in Portland, Oregon. Coming from theatre but drawn to making outside of traditional frameworks, he is interested in developing personal projects that are body-oriented, site-specific, semi-improvisational, and anti-anthropocentric, influenced by butoh, fantasy, and the natural world. He works in various capacities with Shaking the Tree Theatre, Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble, and Hand2Mouth Theatre, and teaches devised theatre pedagogies to students in schools as a local visiting artist. He holds a B.A. in Theatre and English from the University of Portland and is a graduate of Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s Institute for Contemporary Performance.
“I am both mother and child to grotesque and tender creatures, symbols given breath, born from my meditations on life. I am grateful for the time and space being given to us to play and grow and die and change again and again.“
Performance Works NW || Linda Austin Dance 