Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us)
Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us)
Premiered on November 15, 2017 at the Opéra national de Lorraine (Nancy)
Photos Laurent Philippe
45 MINUTES / 21 DANCERS
A new dance
« In the big room ,the people come. Some are above and some are below, some are quite far away and some are close enough to touch. No one is better or worse than the other. Nothing is pure or neutral, not anymore. (It never was.) We are still learning how to be alive, how to be together. How to understand difference at a time of increasing anxiety. What happens when a society of individuals produce multivalent, unstable but dynamic meaning? Let’s call it a dance. Why struggle for coherence, when illegibility is the only political recourse that remains? The current moment holds infinite sorrow. But fuck it, I’m not crying. Either way, tonight we will sleep in our beds, alone or entangled, as the moon shines. »
Miguel Gutierrez
Miguel Gutierrez
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.
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. He has received support from Creative Capital, MAP, National Dance Project, National Performance Network, Dance/NYC and Jerome Foundation. He has received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, the Tides Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, United States Artists, an award from Foundation for Contemporary Art, a 2016 Franky Award from Prelude Festival and four Bessies. He is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist.
Recent work includes: Unsustainable Solutions: Duet with my Dead Dad, in which he dances and performs to video footage of his father and family; This Bridge Called My Ass, a piece that bends tropes of Latinidad to identify new relationships to content and form; Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us), a commission for CCN - Ballet de Lorraine inspired by the French May '68 protests. With Ishmael Houston-Jones he co-directed Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd, which received a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Revival.
He has been an artist in residence at MANCC, LMCC, Centre Choréographique National de Montpellier, Centre National de Danse Pantin, Baryshnikov Art Center, and Gibney. He has created music for several of his works, for Antonio Ramos’ work, and with Colin Self for Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony. He performs with Nick Hallett as Nudity in Dance. Since 2017 he has spearheaded a music project called SADONNA, where he performs sad versions of upbeat Madonna songs. At the end of 2021, he debuted a new project of original songs called sueño.
His book WHEN YOU RISE UP is available from 53rd State Press. His essays have been published in A Life in Dance (ed. Rebecca Stenn and Fran Kirmser), In Terms of Performance: A Keywords Anthology (ed. Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola) and his essay “Does Abstraction Belong To White People” is one of the most viewed essays on BOMB’s website.
He has taught regularly at a variety of festivals and intensives such as Forum Dança, La Caldera, ImPulsTanz, Camping/CND, SFADI, Lion’s Jaw, American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, MELT at Movement Research, Earthdance, Danza Común, New Aesthetics, Performatica, and Ponderosa and he has been a Visiting Lecturer/Guest Artist at several universities including DOCH, Konstfack, P.A.R.T.S., Bennington College, Hollins University’s MFA Dance Program, School of Art Institute of Chicago’s Low Res MFA Art Program, Yale University’s MFA Program in Sculpture, RISD, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA, CalArts, University of Illinois, The New School/Eugene Lang, New York University’s Experimental Theater Wing, Hunter College, and many more. He currently teaches at Princeton University and in the MFA Art Program at Hunter College. He is the program director for LANDING, a community-building, non-academic educational initiative. He invented DEEP AEROBICS in 2007, disseminated it for ten years, and then killed it in 2017. He is also a Feldenkrais Method® practitioner.
In 2021 he began releasing episodes of Are You For Sale? a podcast that looks at the ethical entanglements between money and art making. In 2022 he will premiere a new duet at Bates Dance Festival called I as another, which was commissioned by Princeton University. He will present a dance and music concert version of sueño at the High Line Park in New York in September.