Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People
2010-2011 Swing Space Resident, Building 110: LMCC’s Arts Center At Governors Island
'The Medium Eva C. With a Materialization on her Head and a Luminous Apparition Between Her Hands,' 1912 by Albert von Schrenk Notzing
Miguel Gutierrez is a New York based dance and music artist who has been called “one of our most provocative and necessary artistic voices” by Eva Yaa Asantewaa of Dance Magazine. He makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. In his pieces, the interplay of movement, text, sound and light creates, for the performers and the audience, an immersive state of immediacy and attention. Interested in enduring philosophical questions about desire, longing, and the search for meaning, Gutierrez's work sits inside a legacy of process-focused experimental dance while drawing on far-reaching influences such as endurance based performance art, noise music, ecstatic experience in social and religious rituals, the study of mind/body somatic systems, and various histories of spectacle including Broadway, Vegas, and queer performance in alternative clubs from the 80’s until now.
His work has been presented at festivals and venues nationally and internationally, including the American Realness Festival in NY; Festival D’Automne in Paris; Antipodes Festival in Brest, France; TBA/PICA in Portland, Oregon; Out There Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; UNAM in Mexico City, and ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Austria.
He has received support from Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, Rockefeller MAP Fund, NYFA, NEA and NPN. In 2010 he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and United States Artists. He is the winner of three New York Dance and Performance Bessie awards. WHEN YOU RISE UP, a book of his performance texts, is available from 53rd State Press. He also invented DEEP AEROBICS, an absurdist workout for the radical in all of us.
Gutierrez assembled the first incarnation of the Powerful People in 2001. Committed to working outside the traditional model of a dance company, Gutierrez sees the participating artists in his work – dancers, composers, designers and visual artists – as part of an ever-expanding net of inspiring collaborators. Regardless of the scale of the project, Gutierrez’s goal is to create challenging and thought-provoking performance experiences.
During the LMCC Governor's Island residency, Miguel will work on And lose the name of action, a new evening length piece for six award winning performers – Michelle Boulé, Hilary Clark, Luke George, Miguel Gutierrez, K.J. Holmes and Ishmael Houston-Jones- with sound design by Neal Medlyn, lighting by Lenore Doxsee, and visuals by Boru O'Brien O'Connell. The piece is the result of three years of research into the various conceptions of mind/body in the fields of neurology, philosophy, somatic practice, improvisation and the paranormal.
