Photo: Canaan Mattson for the Walker Art Center.
The Walker’s annual dance showcase celebrates over 50 years of works by Minnesota choreographers, offering an exciting glimpse into a vibrant and diverse community. For the 50th anniversary of Choreographers’ Evening, guest curators Alanna Morris and Judith Howard offer a program of works that honor and recognize the rich histories, vital contributions, and power of today’s movement innovators.
“For half a century, Choreographers’ Evening has stood as a testament to creativity, diversity, tenacity and independence of Minnesota’s rich dance community” said Philip Bither, McGuire Director and Senior Curator for Performing Arts. “We are thrilled to be celebrating this important marker, that speaks more than ever to our dance community’s uniqueness, and collaborative, mutually-supportive spirit.”
Choreographers’ Evening 50th Anniversary:
Curated by Judith Howard and Alanna Morris
Saturday, November 26, 4 & 7 pm
$31.50 ($25 Walker members)
Featured choreographers for this year’s program are Aloe AoLiu, Romeo Cannady, Colin Edwards and Canaan Mattson, Elizabeth Flinsch, Averie Mitchell-Brown, Alys Ayumi Ogura, Kayla Schiltgen, Kristin Van Loon and J. H. Shuǐ Xiān, and Laurie Van Wieren. Join us for a remarkable evening highlighting the strength and exuberance of Minnesota dance.
NOTE FROM THE CURATORS
HERE! NOW! FORWARD!
As curators we selected artists whose work felt urgent to show in this particular showcase, at this particular time. Artists whose work surprised and intrigued us; artists who represent various identities, stories, and aesthetics. We were drawn to introspection; work that brought us into our bodies, as well as projects that created impact in the moment, spoke to real experience, and captivated our imaginations.
We asked the artists: What is alive for you right now and what questions are you asking within your practice?
This 50th Choreographer’s Evening Anniversary showcase honors legacy as something that continues to be earned and gives space to emerging artists who do not hang back! The work moves us, sends us forward, and opens the door to what’s next.
ABOUT THE CHOREOGRAPHERS
Aloe AoLiu
Aloe AoLiu is a dancer, choreographer, and performance artist from Yunnan Province, China. She graduated from Denmark International Youth Leader Education graduate program and holds a bachelor’s degree in dance performance from Yunnan Arts University and a Master of Education from Renmin University in China. Aloe has performed in more than a thousand shows and was the principal dancer in several well-known dance drama productions such as Dynamic Yunnan, A Shangri-La Spectacular, and Beautiful South. She has performed at large-scale national events such as the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games and Shanghai World Expo. She has choreographed and directed many contemporary dance dramas, including Lost in Dream, Hidden Emotion, It will pass, and You. Between 2018 and 2021, she was invited as a guest artist to various international art festivals including Over the Cloud International Live Art Festival, MIPAF Macau International Live Art Festival, and Up On International Live Art Festival. She held a Liu Ao (Aloe)Personal Contemporary Art Exhibition “Feed” at the Kunming Kong Space Art Museum. Aloe recently moved to Minnesota where she will begin to create more possibilities here.
Romeo Cannady
Romeo Cannady is a Saint Paul, Minnesota, native dance/movement artist. Romeo explicitly combines his deeply rooted passions to fuse with his signature choreographic movement language. Throughout the years of his ventures into spirituality and personal development, he tapped into his internal power. Romeo’s mother, Tanya Lynn, who directed the dance department at their church until Romeo’s senior year of high school, urged him to begin dancing at the age of 6. Romeo would go on to attend the University of Minnesota where he majored in dance and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He had the pleasure of dancing in works by Dr. Gaynell Sherrod and Robert Moses as an undergraduate student. As a developing dance artist, he continues his dancing with TU Dance’s CUL·TI·VATE, A Trainee Program; and the BLAQ Dance Company.
Colin Edwards and Canaan Mattson
Colin Edwards and Canaan Mattson are co-directors/choreographers for Meridian Movement Co (MMC). MMC is a collaborative company with the focus of generating a new somatic healing language for black men using movement to investigate and reflect topics around identity, personhood, and the shared ideal of community. This process hopes to be an incubation on fatherhood through spoken, written, and movement workshops, diving deeper into how choreographed movement can be the flowering of a therapeutic somatic exercise. The piece hopes to ask questions, to share, to interview, to find solutions and to bring to light the most important, joyful, and painful parts of fatherhood and the ways it affects all dancers as male identifying people.
Elizabeth Flinsch
Elizabeth Flinsch is a transdisciplinary artist based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Their work takes the form of performance, interdisciplinary sculpture, and imagined realities in which chance, desire, and impulse are among the cornerstones. Working within the limitations as a survivor of traumatic brain injury, they see memory loss and visual dysfunction as an asset to embodied movement. As a choreographer and performer their work is always in metamorphosis; a state of continuous becoming. Part ritual, part inquiry, the work is elongated and deliberate. Their collaboration with musician Jordan Lawrence poses a form of mutual emergence; a symbiosis of simultaneous expression. Together they offer a glimpse of this ceremonial encounter with a creative unconscious.
Averie Mitchell-Brown
After first dancing on stage at the age of 11, Averie strived to make any aspect of dance her life by taking classes in ballroom, West African, break dancing, jazz, and contemporary. Averie Mitchell-Brown is a University of Minnesota – Twin Cities graduate aspiring to touch as many lives as possible with her love, light, artistry, and talent. She has worked with well-known artists like Al Taw’am – The Twins as a crew member in S.H.E – She Who Holds Everything, Kenna Cottman in Voice of Culture drum and Dance, Aneka McMullen in Epitome No Question, Bboy J-Sun, Leah Nelson, and many more. Working with other artists and dancers of different styles helped her improve as a dancer holistically and become more knowledgeable in the origins of the dance community here in the Twin Cities. She lives her life as a multidisciplinary artist with a focus in African diasporic dance. When not dancing, she is touching the lives of many as an educator and traveling with her family.
Alys Ayumi Ogura
Alys Ayumi Ogura is a storyteller through her movements, voice, and quirky humor. Growing up an only child in Japan gave her enough space and time to let her imagination go wild. After trading the surroundings of rice fields for Iowa’s corn fields, she determined that dance and movement are the best outlets for her to share the ever-percolating stories that come from her life experiences. Ogura’s movement and choreography are most influenced by her first two mentors, the late Mika Kurosawa, and Rob Scoggins, who each offered boundless encouragement. The Minnesota dance community’s nurturing environment and talented artists is a strong reason why Ogura pursues making her own works. Ogura is a former Arts Organizing Institute Fellow (2017-18) through the Pangea World Theater and a Naked Stages Fellow (2021) managed by Pillsbury House Theater and funded by the Jerome Foundation. She is now a DanceMN steering committee member.
Kayla Schiltgen
Kayla Schiltgen is a rural artist from Two Harbors, a community of 3,500 people on Minnesota’s North Shore, the ancestral land of the Anishinabewaki. She creates screendance, a hybrid medium using dance and film to innovate movement language that solely exists on the screen. As a neurodiverse introvert, Kayla finds gladness in a mostly solo practice with the natural environment as her collaborator. Her daily life is informed by interacting with her surroundings in delicate, intuitive, and intentional ways, and her artistic practice is saturated by this kind of attentiveness. Kayla does not find accomplishment as an indicator of artistic merit or worth but rather takes solace in her dedication to her truth and path as a creative being which began as a child improvising movement to the radio in the hayloft of the family farm and has led her on a beautifully stubborn journey of embodying, documenting and sharing her curiosity for existence. The virtual premiere of her full screendance, object permanence, accompanied by an artist chat, is happening in December and she would love to share this with you. To attend the screening and learn more about Kayla’s practice you can visit her website at www.kaylaschiltgen.com and follow her on Instagram @kaylaschiltgen.
Kristin Van Loon
Kristin Van Loon grew up a competitive figure skater in the Chicago suburbs and earned a BA in Geology from Colorado College in 1993. She then moved to Minneapolis and debuted HIJACK, her choreographic collaboration with Arwen Wilder, at Choreographer’s Evening that fall. HIJACK’s 20th anniversary was celebrated with the Walker Commission of redundant, ready, reading, radish Red Eye for the McGuire Stage and the chapbook Passing for Dance: a HIJACK Reader published by Contact Quarterly. She has danced in the works of Catherine Sullivan, Morgan Thorson, Chris Schlichting, Chris Yon, Karen Sherman, Judith Howard, Laurie Van Wieren, Steve Paxton, and Lisa Nelson, among others. Van Loon/HIJACK teaches Improvisation / composition at Zenon, the University of Minnesota, and Carleton College. Van Loon is the Artistic Director of the Bryant Lake Bowl Theater and co-runs HAIR+NAILS Contemporary Art Gallery with Ryan Fontaine. She curated Choreographer’s Evening in 1996 as HIJACK and in 2001 with Judith Brin Ingber.
J. H. Shuǐ Xiān
J H Shuǐ Xiān is an interdisciplinary choreographer, improviser, and sound artist (video & installation on the way, keep your eyes peeled!). She has enjoyed creating works in Mni Sota Makoce since 2015 and has recently enjoyed performing for and collaborating with others including Dua Saleh, Rosy Simas, Heather Kravas, Shayna Allen, lazer axelrood, Valerie Oliviero, Leila Awadallah, Judith Howard, Shayna Allen, Maddie Granlund, Emily Gastineau, and Erin Drummond. She is a 2017 Q-Stage: New Works and 2019 Momentum: New Dance Works recipient and was part of the 2022 Red Eye Works-In-Progress cohort. She also serves as a teaching artist at Young Dance, and has been focused on living life with comfort, consistency, and love as top priorities. Judee is honored to be part of Choreographers’ Evening for the 4th time this year under curation of artists she much admires.
Laurie Van Wieren
Laurie Van Wieren (she/her) grew up on the west side of Chicago and moved to Minneapolis where she fell in with a pack of dance and art makers. Her first full-length dance work was co-produced by the MN Dance Alliance and the Walker Art Center with music created by Michelle Kinney. Van Wieren has created solo, ensemble, and site-specific works throughout the Twin Cities. Her dances have been seen in Chicago, Fargo, New York, Potsdam, Germany, and Yaroslavl, Russia. She is an artist advocate and has curated and produced performances at the Southern Theater, Ritz Theater, SOO Visual Art Center, and 9×22 Dance/Lab, the monthly inclusive performance/discussion platform that she created (2003 to 2019). Her work has received awards from McKnight, Jerome, Bush, NEA, Rockefeller Foundations, MN State Arts Board, MN Sage Awards, and City Pages. She is currently creating work exploring ancestral landscapes.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Judith Howard has been making dances in the Twin Cities for more than 30 years and her work has been presented at numerous venues, nationally and internationally, including the Walker Art Center, the Southern Theater, 9×22 Dance Lab, the NY Improvisation Festival and the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Yaroslavl, Russia. Her choreographic research includes the equation of gender and spectacle, geopolitical injustices, subversive and collaborative procedures, ineffable states of being, and pushing the proscenium. She has performed the work of numerous choreographers including: Super Group, HIJACK, Morgan Thorson, Laurie Van Wieren, Off-Leash Area, Shapiro and Smith, Skewed Visions, April Sellers, and Mad King Thomas. Her work has been supported by the McKnight and Jerome Foundations, the MN Regional Arts Council, and Carleton College. She was selected “Twin Cities Best Choreographer” in 2005, and has received Sage Awards for: Outstanding Performance (with April Sellers, 2006), Outstanding Dance Educator (2014), and Outstanding Performer for her solo in the work of Super Group (2016). Howard is currently a professor in dance at Carleton College, where she is the chair of the Theater and Dance Department and director of the Dance Program.
Alanna Morris is a Dancer-Choreographer, Educator, Artist Organizer, and Curator. Morris danced with TU Dance (St. Paul) under Artistic Directors, Toni Pierce-Sands and Uri Sands from 2007–2017. In 2020, they served as the company’s Artistic Associate and is a founding teaching artist at the School at TU Dance Center. In 2018 they were named Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch!” In 2019, Minneapolis’ City Pages’ Artist of the Year and Best Choreographer for their solo, “Yam, Potatoe an Fish!” They have received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation for Dance (2015) and Choreography (2021) and is a Springboard Danse Montreal Fellow (2022). Alanna returns from working in Montréal for the month of June, researching and presenting her choreography for an ensemble of danseurs. Morris is the Artistic Director of I A.M. Arts, founded in 2017 to produce collaborative solo dance works and global commissions that uplift and inspire our humanity; educational programs that utilize the creative arts as a tool for self-development; and community-building initiatives that assist mid-career women Creatives with spiritual, professional, and economic resources to thrive. Morris is currently developing a thesis around the divinity of black-ness, being researched in phases over multiple years and collaborative solo performance. Its last presentation was co-presented by the Great Northern Festival, the Cowles Center for Dance, and Northrop February 2022 for in-person and livestream audiences. Morris is currently touring Let The Crows Come with Ashwini Ramaswamy and collaborators and premiering a new work of dance and visual arts, also directed by Ashwini Ramaswamy, Invisible Cities, co-presented by The Great Northern, Northrop and the Cowles Center for Dance in January 2023. She is a Visiting Professor of Dance at Carleton College and a graduate of the Juilliard School and LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and the Performing Arts (NY). http://www.iamartss.com/
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