Announcing our 2021/22 Season

Dear Friends,

After a year of so much uncertainty, we are grateful to be here for another season, continuing to serve our local community in the creation of unique programming with ongoing and original collaborations across disciplines, communities and geographic locations, always centering the body as the primary site for artistic inquiries at an individual, communal and institutional level. We hope you enjoy exploring our season below. In so many ways, we are still here because of YOU, our community. Please stay in touch, check out our programs at culturemill.org -- whether online or in person, we can't wait to see you this year.

Love,
The Culture Mill Team
 

***COVID-19 NOTE: Due to the changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, Culture Mill has decided to reduce our public programs that gather large numbers of people indoors as well as outdoors for the remainder of 2021. We will continue to hold rehearsals for upcoming works in the Spring of 2022, as well as private artistic laboratory sessions in smaller groups, and will move our public classes to a virtual setting. We feel these decisions will allow us to continue developing artworks and serving our community, while working to minimize the spread of COVID-19.

Moving Through

A trans-disciplinary project linking contemporary dance with new approaches to Parkinson’s Disease

Culture Mill will continue its third year of Moving Through, the transdisciplinary project linking Contemporary Dance with new approaches to Parkinson’s Disease. The collaboration, led by Murielle Elizéon and Tommy Noonan, develops as an ongoing partnership with the American Dance Festival, which is supported by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council as well as RTI International. Noonan, Elizeon, choreographer Leah Wilks and dance education specialist Annie Dwyer will teach a series of 6 virtual workshops, open to any and all dancers of all abilities living both with and without Parkinson’s Disease.

The team will also convene a small working group of specialists in Parkinson’s Disease and Occupational Therapy, to research how their method of creative movement exploration might effectively be applied to a home-environment. Additionally, Culture Mill collaborators will continue to plan for an upcoming pilot study at Duke University Movement Disorders Clinic.

As considerations of equity and access are vital to this work, Culture Mill is also committed to developing new partnerships in Alamance County to provide access to their classes for aging populations and underserved communities. More on this specific program can be found at www.movingthrough.live

BodyStorm

A new commission by Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company

A new artistic outgrowth of our "Moving Through" project is a commission by Salt Lake City-based Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, titled BodyStorm. The work will focus on physical rendering of autobiographical material, and will be informed by interactions between dancers in the company and local people living with Parkinson’s Disease. BodyStorm will be created in collaboration with Paris-based choreographer Clint Lutes, and will premiere in Salt Lake City on April 28th, 2022 before going on tour.

Eclipse

A new relational performance by Tommy Noonan & Murielle Elizéon / Culture Mill

• April 9th and 10th, 2022 at 7:30pm
• The Current Artspace & Studio, Chapel Hill, nC
• FREE

In Eclipse, Culture Mill brings together audiences and professional artists to build an imaginary monument for a (im)possible “we.” Just before sundown, you are invited to join a choreographic practice outside CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio, which uses restorative justice practices and embodiment tools to investigate how our assembled bodies and stories might form the architecture for a togetherness we don’t yet know.

“Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the bones.” So goes a proverb of the Asaro Tribe of Papau New Guinea. In our current global moment, democracy, too, feels increasingly such a rumor whose complexities are not fully practiced and lived together in assembled bodies and their accompanying memories and histories.

Located on the green outside CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio. Mask-wearing required. Runtime is approximately 90 minutes.

Southern Futures

A multi-year collaboration with Carolina Performing Arts

Culture Mill will begin an exciting partnership with Carolina Performing Arts (CPA) this year in CPA’s “Southern Futures'' program -- an initiative that meets this pivotal moment in history by engaging artists, academics, students, community and institutional partners in restorative justice and co-creation.

The process for creating Eclipse will serve as a framework for Culture Mill’s design of other artist residencies as a part of “Southern Futures”, notably Marcella Murray, David Neumann and Tei Blow in 2021, expanding over three years to include multiple collaborators from around the United States. Culture Mill will work to design and link each artist residency together in connection with Southern Futures' mission to examine the past of the UNC campus and greater community, and imagine the future, focusing on humble listening and community engagement, and bringing storytelling and art to the foreground.

Aroz & How To

Two new works in Development

The development of more intimate individual performances remain core to Culture Mill’s work. Murielle Elizéon continues her collaboration with Shana Tucker, developing a new duet called Aroz, which began while in residency with NC State Live in 2020/21. Tommy Noonan will show an in-progress performance of How To in Saxapahaw, date TBD in winter 2022; How To is a performative attempt at being human, made in collaboration with Mia Habib Productions and 5 other artists from 5 continents. How To will tour to Norway in May of 2022.

Sylvester Allen

2021/22 Culture Mill Artist-in-Residence

Culture Mill’s artist in residence for the 2021/22 season will be Burlington-based theater director, performer and musician Sylvester Allen. Allen has produced Culture Mill’s only in-person hosted event in 2021 with The Spirit of Wyatt Outlaw: Final Peace -- an original play written and directed by Allen, which tells the story of Outlaw -- the first appointed African-American town commissioner and constable of Graham, North Carolina, who was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1870. In Allen’s residency with Culture Mill this season he will focus on the composition of original Jazz pieces that weave together music, movement and text.