2023 PRODUCTION RESIDENCY

LINKS HALL

Maggie Bridger is a sick and disabled dance artist, scholar, and access worker interested in reimagining pain through the dancemaking process. She is a 2022 City of Chicago Individual Artist Program grantee and a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Maggie is a co-founder of the Inclusive Dance Workshop Series, a community-run series of dance workshops designed for all bodies, minds, and experience levels. Maggie was part of the inaugural cohort of the Dancing Disability Lab at UCLA and was a Synapse Arts 2021 New Works Artist, through which she developed and premiered her dance film, Radiate. In 2022, she and her collaborator, Sydney Erlikh, served as co-artistic directors for Unfolding Disability Futures, a multi-organization, site-specific performance and installation organized by local disabled artists and held at The Plant, a former meatpacking facility in the Back of the Yards/New City Neighborhood. She is currently a Fellow Artist in Residence with High Concept Labs, where she recently premiered a new original work, Scale, as well as launching LabE, a program designed to connect, platform, and support Chicago’s disability dance community. Maggie serves on See Chicago Dance’s Dance Amplification Committee and the organizing committee for the Chicago Dance Studies Working Group. She is an administrative fellow with the Dance Studies Association. Her writing has been published in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.

During her production residency, Maggie will begin work to develop a live version of her dance film, Radiate. Working with fellow disabled artists and Links Hall, she will continue to explore how a broad and flexible approach to access might transform the embodied experience of making, performing, and witnessing dance.

Image Description: 1. Maggie, a fat white woman with short brown hair, sits cross legged in front of a dark brown radiator against a light blue wall. She wears a long black nightgown. A heating pad lays on the floor beside Maggie, its cord stretched in a circle around her. 2. Maggie, a fat white woman with short brown hair, stands on one leg with the other kicked out behind her. Her body reaches out, thrown in a swooping, horizontal line. She’s in an industrial space with worn down brick floors, stained tile walls and metal fixtures. She wears red overalls over a black shirt and a black and gold windowed mask.