PELE BAUCH is a choreographer and dance dramaturg. As a dance dramaturg she has worked with Brian Brooks, Debra Black, Yanira Castro, Rachel Cohen, Barbie Diewald, Jody Oberfelder, Jody Sperling, among others. She has provided creative feedback to well over 100 artists. Pele was on The Field’s staff for 10 years, mainly as Associate Director, Programming. As a choreographer, she received residencies from The Joyce Theater Foundation, Dance Theater Workshop, the Chocolate Factory, and 92Y Harkness Dance Center. Her work has been selected for presentation at NYC venues including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, HERE's TALR and the Best of TALR, Dixon Place, and BAX. Pele has received funding from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Harkness Foundation for Dance, and Brooklyn Arts Council. “It’s a joy to see the bravery with which Ms. Bauch asks her questions, and the quiet force of her vision come to life and surround us,” - Dancing World. www.pelebauch.org
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SHALEWA MACKALL, a Fieldwork facilitator since 2004, belongs to the community of artists making work that embraces the Akan tradition of Sankofa, which invites creators to move forward in full awareness and embrace of what has preceded historically and culturally; she is inspired by aesthetic traditions and creative movements that recycle, repurpose and reinvent that which came before. In a way that reflects layers of identity and creative practice, Mackall embraces the possibility of making works as a teacher, choreographer, writer and performer which celebrate the idea of both/andand stand as an alternative to the either/or construct. With her dance company Movement for the Urban Village (MUV), she has crafted an original and distinctive movement language, Ancient Modern Dance, defined as contemporary dance which is grounded in the techniques and traditions of the African Diaspora. Since 2004 MUV has graced stages including BAM Fisher, Summerstage, Joyce SoHo, Irondale and the Kumble Theater. Presently a member of the faculty at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, Mackall is currently developing new work joining personal ethnography, memoir and dance.
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NAOKO MAESHIBA is a dancer, performer, director, somatic practitioner, and educator. She comes from an intercultural and interdisciplinary background of dance, theatre, literature, and linguistics. Having extensively trained with the masters of physical expression from East and West, she brings her eclectic sensibility into her work and teaching. She has been exploring emotions in body and potency of movement through her study of Noh, Body weather, Limon technique, Dance improvisation, Noguchi gymnastics, Feldenkrais, Michael Chekhov, and Grotowski. She ran the experimental performance program at Towson University's MFA in theatre arts from 2013-2018, and was a faculty there from 2000-2018 teaching various subjects including ‘essential body’ and ‘movement for actors’. Through her company, Naoko Maeshiba/Kibism, she has created and presented solo, duo, and ensemble works nationally and internationally at venues such as Joyce Soho (NY), Tank (NY), Kennedy Center (DC), Dance Place (DC), Dance Hakushu (Japan), Theatre Jo (Czech Republic), and M25 (Warsaw, Poland). Her artist residencies include Kud Mureza (Slovenia), National Film, TV, and Theatre School (Lodz, Poland), and Cultural Exchange Station In Tabor (Tabor, Czech Republic). Guest artist spots include: Pace University, University of Maryland College Park, Salem State College, Ko Festival of Performance at Amherst, and Questfest. In 2015, she launched a solo performance project called SUBJECT/OBJECT which looks into her cultural identity and influence of nurture/nature through different patterns of movements. Naoko is a guild-certified Feldenkrais practitioner (FGCF) and a certified nutritional consultant (CNC). Currently, she writes a column ‘Performance Power Up!’ for a Japanese newspaper Weekly New York Life and works as a somatic practitioner at Natural Healing Artists Inc., enhancing the innate human ability to heal by integrating body/mind/spirit and researching the approaches toward art-life continuum. www.naokibi.com | www.naturalhealingartists.com
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JAMES SCRUGGS, a writer, performer and arts administrator, creates large scale, multi-media, topical theatrical work usually focusing on race, and gender politics. He has received several grants including a 2016 NJSCA Fellowship for artistic excellence, a 2016 Creative Capital Grant, and a 2015 MAP Grant to write and produce 3/Fifths, performed by a large cast in two spaces at 3LD Art & Technology Center, NYC in 2017. It explores racism and mass incarceration. In 2005, when the phenomenon of unarmed black men being killed by policeman began rising, Scruggs wrote, performed, and was video designer for Disposable Men produced by HERE Arts Center, NYC. It was his solo work that examined the uncanny similarities that Hollywood monsters and African American men share; the unfounded fear of, and the creative ways they are killed. Disposable Men went on to be presented in Philadelphia, Boston, and Atlanta. He decided to use Disposable Men as a seed for 3/5, an up close radically interactive investigation of the historic whorl African Americans are caught up in: the historical slavery-emancipation-black codes loop to the more contemporary incarceration-decarceration-felon box loop. He has gained valuable experience making ambitious experimental theatrical work at 3LD Art & Technology Center. Deepest Man, a work he wrote and produced in 2014 exploring free-diving as a cure for grief, used a 40' Holographic Projection Surface, allowing underwater images to appear to float in front of the actors. He is currently a curator and resident artist at 3LD and works freelance at The Field, NYC as a Fieldwork facilitator for peer to peer critical feedback workshops for artists. Scruggs has a BFA in Film from SVA in NYC, and was also the recipient of a Franklyn Furnace Grant, an Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Grant, and an Innovative Theater Award for Outstanding Solo Performance. www.jamesscruggs.com
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