The Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist program was created in 2011 by New York Live Arts to address what we perceive to be an overall lack of support for mid-career artists. The program is by-invitation only and offers a salary, health benefits, two years of residency time and a commission of a new work to premiere at New York Live Arts. Select works will then be chosen for a fully produced national and/or international tour managed by New York Live Arts.
Driscoll’s new work Weathering is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects. Ten people (dancers/singers/crew) enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen and cleave, in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of the central, spiraling scenes. The symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking, choreography of micro events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable. Driscoll and her team of collaborators ask: How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger? Yet are animating and activating our bodies all the time? How do we get closer to the impact? Can we slow down enough to feel the dust, hurt, howl, absence, spill, plume?
Photo by Bea Borgers
The 2023-2024 Randjelović/Stryker RCA, Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, composer, performer, singer, writer, educator, podcaster, visual artist, and arts advocate who has been based in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn for twenty five years. His work creates empathetic and irreverent spaces outside of traditional discourse – he believes in an approach to art making that is fierce, fragile, empathetic, political, and poetic.
As the seventh RCA, Gutierrez begins his residency after premiering the new duet I as another at Bates Dance Festival in 2022, which was commissioned by Princeton University. His work has been presented in more than 60 cities around the world, in venues and festivals such as Festival d’Automne, Centre National de Danse, Centre Pompidou, Montpellier Danse, Festival Universitario/Colombia, Bipod Festival/Beirut, ImPulsTanz, Fringe Arts, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, TBA/PICA, MCA Chicago, Live Arts Bard, and the Kathleen Hermesdorf Fresh Fest. New York at The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, BAM, Danspace Project, Abrons Art Center, the Chocolate Factory, American Realness Festival, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In 2017 he created a commissioned work for Ballet de Lorraine.
Photo by Ian Douglas