Announcing the 2023 Lab Artists!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 3, 2022, 8:00AM
MEDIA CONTACT: Shawn Lent, Programs and Communications Director
High Resolution images are available here.
Chicago Dancemakers Forum announces the 2023 Lab Artists:
These Chicago-based dancemakers will each receive a grant of $25,000 along with a year of tailored support during an extended period of creative research, development, and potential presentation of new dance work. During the Lab Year (January to December 2023), the grant can be spent fully at the discretion of each artist, with funds covering rent or other living expenses, mentorship, research, collaborator fees, and other expenses that support the artist while continuing their creative practice or making dance work. For the 2023 Lab Artists Program, the grant amount has been increased over previous years to make additional support services like healthcare, childcare, and other wellness needs more accessible for artists throughout their Lab Year.
The Lab Artists Program is tailored to each participant and aims to foster growth and artistic fulfillment while also building relationships among dancemakers, presenters, audiences, and supporters. Past Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artists work in a variety of dance forms and collectively, they represent the distinct character and power of dance made in Chicago. Many of these artists have built national audiences and international recognition since receiving support from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum.
This year, 10 Finalists were selected for the distinctness of their artistic vision, their body of work, and the timing of the program in their artistic trajectory. Supporting this year’s selection process by serving as review panelists were Victor Alexander (2012 Lab Artist), Jenn Freeman/Po’Chop (2018 Lab Artist), Kayla Hamilton, and Valerie Oliveiro. This 20th anniversary year of the program was open to all eligible dancemakers but prioritized artists that we recognize have historically been underrepresented in the program – Indigenous, Immigrant, Trans or Non-Binary, Parent or Caregiver, and/or Disabled Artists, or those with a creative practice that directly benefits these communities. 80% of the open call applicants and 100% of the finalists self-identified with one or more of the prioritization categories.
Last week, the four 2023 Lab Artists were selected by random draw from the group of 10 finalists. Serving as accountability observers for the random draw were La Mar Brown, Bob Faust, Joanna Furnans, Rika Lin, Marcela Torres, Kim D. Ricardo, and Kinnari Vora. Shawn Lent, Programs and Communications Director, shares, “Similarly to our peer organizations who also offer artistic development programs with granting elements, we are constantly evaluating and editing our work towards greater equity. Once a group of finalists are selected through a competitive process, randomization helps reduce the impact of curatorial gatekeeping that can happen with short lists. Over recent years, we have been talking internally about random selection, lightening the application form(s), and identifying prioritization. It made sense to pilot this revised process for the 20th anniversary of the program. We plan to evaluate these changes before committing to a similar selection process for the 2024 Lab Artists.”
Chicago Dancemakers Forum catalyzes the growth and artistic fulfillment of Chicago’s dancemakers by providing time and resources for in-depth exploration and creation in choreographed, improvised, and communal forms. Since its inception in 2003, Chicago Dancemakers Forum has granted over $1.25 million to local artists and is the most significant, sustained source of support for individual dancemakers working in Chicago that has an open call process.
The 2023 Lab Artists will be celebrated during the closing party of the Elevate Chicago Dance festival on Sunday, October 16, 2022 at 21c Museum Hotel Chicago. Tickets for the event are $15 including reception with open bar.
For more information, please contact Shawn Lent, Programs and Communications Director at shawn@chicagodancemakers.org.
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They/Them
Photo credit: Kaleb Autman
Benji Hart is a Chicago-based author, artist, and educator whose work centers Black radicalism, queer liberation, and prison abolition. Their words have appeared in numerous anthologies, and been published at Time, Teen Vogue, The Advocate, and elsewhere. They have led popular education and arts-based workshops for organizations internationally, including the American Repertory Theater, Young Chicago Authors, and Project NIA. They have read at the Poetry Foundation, Women & Children First, the Guild Literary Complex, and their performances have been featured at La Goyco, Santurce; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Den Frie, Copenhagen. They have held fellowships with Yaddo, Trillium Arts, MacDowell, and are a 2023 Lab Artist with Chicago Dancemakers Forum.
In conjunction with their ongoing performance project, “World After This One,” Benji will spend the year engaged in movement research, building with mentor artists specifically in the areas of bomba, vogue, and praise dance, working towards a culminating performance in Chicago with workshops and programming in concert with the showing.
Call to Action: Donate to Chicago Torture Justice Center, which provides support for survivors of police violence.
She/Her
Photo credit: Kees
Enneréssa is a multi-hyphenated artist and CEO/Founder of Praize Productions, Inc. As an accomplished writer and choreographer, she has produced eight award-winning, theatrical productions and most recently directed her first motion picture. She has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education from Indiana University. She is a community activist whose work is committed to amplifying the voices of the Black community. Enneréssa received a CMS Merit Award, an America’s Big Sisters Award, and was named to the Young Women’s Professional League’s “40 Under 40” for her work in the arts. Enneréssa was chosen by Ingenuity to sit on its Public Affairs Collective Impact Panel to improve arts education for Chicago’s youth. In 2021, she was selected to co-chair the Economic Development Pillar for the citywide initiative, WeWill Chicago.
For her Lab year project, Enneréssa plans to create a dance work that tells a story of Blackness and womanhood and the ability to navigate and thrive in a society that does not protect those two things and wishes to dilute its “potency” and necessity. She will develop a book of poetry by gathering her writings and discovering how to convey written narrative through movement in a way that reaches the audiences’ multiple senses. The movement will convey a coming of age for Black women with “difficult” names. The movement will be set to jazz, Gospel, blues, and house music; fundamental genres that are both rooted in Black and Chicago culture.
Any pronouns
Photo credit: Courtesy of the Artist
Zachary Nicol is an artist living and working in Chicago. Their interdisciplinary work uses research in dance, movement, site, and image to unfold problems of the performing body. Their work has been shown at Links Hall, Co-Prosperity, Trap Door Theatre, Lumpen Radio, Filmfront, OuterSpace, Compound Yellow (Chicago), National Museum of Romanian Literature (Bucharest), and S1 Gallery (Portland), has been supported by Chicago Dancemakers Forum and Chicago Artists Coalition, and through residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Annas Projects, ACRE, and Links Hall. Nicol works as a collaborative and performing artist and has contributed to recent projects by Anna Martine Whitehead, Joe Namy, Aram Atamian, Dulcinee DeGuere, and Mlondi Zondi.
Zachary will spend the Lab Year developing a performance work that uses the myth of Narcissus to explore the concept of self: the primacy, problem, and myth of “self” in solo performance, ego and the psyche’s fixation on narrative, the presence and absence of a “black interior,” and the mutability and multiplicity of identity that the frame of performance can offer. The project builds on the artist’s questions of whether representations and images offer a potential other than capture for the performing body, and considers how the frame can be a site of mutability and transformation in our actions to transgress it, divert it, and exceed it.
He/Him
Photo credit: Ron Turney
Winfield RedCloud Woundedeye is a grass dancer, drummer, singer, educator and clothing designer from Chicago (Zhigaagoong) . He continues long lineages of dancers within the Cheyenne and Ojibwe communities. Since childhood, he has danced at cultural events, pow-wows and wacipis (Lakota word for dance and music celebration, literally “they all dance”). He plays the traditional drum (Northern Woodland style drumming and Lakota Sioux Drumming) and sings Lakota Sioux songs. A multimedia creator, he designs, sews and beads in the tradition of grass dancers, honoring the origins of his dance while exploring creative possibilities for its future. In 2020, Winfield danced at an event featuring leading Chicago hip hop artists, forging bonds across local Black and Indigenous communities. In 2021, Winfield began a collaboration with Chicago Footwork dancer Jemal de la Cruz (P-Top) and filmmaker Wills Glasspiegel for a permanent installation film at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport that unites grass dance and Chicago Footwork.
With support of the Lab Artists Program and a period of research, Winfield plans to develop and perform in a new pow-wow in Chicago in 2023 that includes a focus on the living history of the ground and city at our feet. He would like to include various elements of Chicago’s history and culture in the pow-wow, and to host the event in an industrial locale that is not traditionally associated with pow-wows.
