The Moving Artist Residency at the Mendocino Arts Center (MAC) is an emergent residency built for artists responding to the times through performance, dance, ritual, and body-based art practice. We offer this space to those interested in embodying and working with timescapes, legacies, ruptures, and knowledge of the present moment.
For one week of the month-long residency, artists will have the opportunity to participate in a week-long aerial workshop with the Mendocino Dance Project. During this time, artists will take their work off the ground and into the towering redwood trees, exploring vertical dance as a meeting point between body, gravity, and landscape. Through research, improvisation, and collaboration, artists will investigate movement suspended in space, re-imagining dance beyond the horizontal plane and engaging the redwoods as both partner and stage. These rare and unique trees are the tallest trees in the world, echoing history, teaching resiliency, and giving us the opportunity to listen to our own bodies and to the land.
Following this experience, residents are invited to use their remaining weeks to spontaneously/organically shape their experience. We invite artists to experiment with individual and collaborative processes, find ways of sharing space and work and cultivate independence and interdependence.
In times like these, we believe in the power of the artist's attunement to spaces of uncertainty and abundance. We believe in their guidance and what they have to communicate, channel, and transfer to the audience – whether that be us, the land, or the bridge / boundary between the two. We believe that movement is a medium of blessing, emergent relationship, and new direction; a place to experiment and to navigate the unknown we are all walking through. In this vein, we invite artists in this period to experiment alone or in community with the unique landscapes and waters-capes of Mendocino, whose timelessness and boundlessness are our original movers. This focus on place-based emergent performance will allow artists to collaborate and converse with the surrounding area of the Mendocino Arts Center, which poses its own complex juxtapositions: a rural town settled on Coastal Pomo Land, nestled between the redwoods and the sea.
What is included in this residency?
Housing included
$300 food stipend
$200 travel stipend
In times like these, we believe in the power of the artist's attunement to spaces of uncertainty and abundance. We believe in their guidance and what they have to communicate, channel, and transfer to the audience – whether that be us, the land, or the bridge / boundary between the two. We believe that movement is a medium of blessing, emergent relationship, and new direction; a place to experiment and to navigate the unknown we are all walking through. In this vein, we invite artists in this period to experiment alone or in community with the unique landscapes and waters-capes of Mendocino, whose timelessness and boundlessness are our original movers. This focus on place-based emergent performance will allow artists to collaborate and converse with the surrounding area of the Mendocino Arts Center, which poses its own complex juxtapositions: a rural town settled on Coastal Pomo Land, nestled between the redwoods and the sea.
What is included in this residency?
Housing included
$300 food stipend
$200 travel stipend
A cohort of peers
Residents will live in close proximity to each other, and are encouraged to build community in their time here. Residents will also have access to an additional shared kitchen space for communal meals.
Community engagement
At the end of the residency, residents are invited to host a performance/exhibtion or open studio sharing their work, research, or residency experience with the community.
Housing
Private bedroom with shared kitchen and bathroom
Food + Gatherings
We provide a shared kitchen space to help facilitate spontaneous meals and gatherings for residents, as well as other opportunities to build community.
Solidarity Statement
As a program dedicating itself to artists whose truths are often eclipsed by the mainstream, whose foils include constructs other than whiteness, and whose stories are actively being written and difficult to tell, we know that standing in solidarity looks differently for many. Often times, embodying solidarity means showing up imperfectly. Solidarity requires a practice of attunement—learning to listen, with a willingness to learn, and pivot when necessary. MAC is committed to making room for the practice of learning and growing. Growth is never linear and requires reorientation towards humility. As artists, we are in a time of reckoning, we want to continue the urgency of sharing nuanced and challenging stories about connection and equity. Art and healing are crucial in relationships, in community building, and in systemic reform. Learning to be in relation to one another, a community, a movement, an incremental or massive shift can be excruciatingly painful for many. There have been many movements, people, legacies, and sacrifices that have led us to this moment we are living in. It is our hope, as we continue to grow, we weave together an insurmountable expansive web with those committed to a more just and equitable future for all.
Here is a help document in case you should have trouble applying through Artwork Archive:
https://help.artworkarchive.com/en/articles/10246083-how-to-apply-to-a-call-on-artwork-archive-using-a-submit-only-account
