Miguel Gutierrez (choreographer)

Miguel Gutierrez is an American dance and music artist born in 1971. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, he spent the early part of his career performing in San Francisco as a member of the Joe Goode Performance Group.[1] He makes solo works and also works with collaborators as 'Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People'.[2] His work tends towards the emotional and concerns itself with the phenomenon of existence. His fascinations lie with the body's ability to move between the mundane and the transcendent. His research also focuses on how the presence of the audience creates a space of attention and extraordinary perception.[3]

His work has been presented in the Whitney Biennial in 2014, the Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, MIX: The NY Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, Diverseworks in Houston, TX, the Flynn Center in Burlington, VT, and internationally in festivals such as ImPuls Tanz in Vienna, Springdance Festival in Utrecht and Touch:2005 in Archangel, Russia.

Gutierrez received a 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.[4]

May 2016 the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation named Gutierrez a recipient of the Performing Artist Award, a grant "to empower, invest in and celebrate artists.... intended as deepened investments in the artists’ personal and professional development and future work."[5]

Themes

Artist statement: "I make performances that are about things and are things themselves. The things they are about are big: How to live in the world, how to love, how to feel about being yourself. Probably the biggest question I make about art is: Why are we alive, I am a dancer. I write poems. I make songs and music with my voice and rudimentary knowledge of instruments. I think that we are all powerful people"[6]

Selected works

DEEP AEROBICS -- Death Electric Emo Protest Aerobics

DEEP AEROBICS is a workout class in costumes playing on the themes of mortality, political protest, oppression, resistance and hope.[7] It is over an hour of communal/political/conceptual/imaginational workout experience in public. It combines vigorous bouncing of one’s anatomical/spiritual/energetic molecules with the existential absurdity that is living in a world/country/economic system of injustice, war-mongering, and cultural ineptitude.[8]

myendlesslove

Performed at Henry Street Settlement in 2006 and then reconstructed in 2013 at Abron Arts Center, the work explores sex, desire and growing older in gay culture. On the heels of one of the major works of his career and the worst breakup of his life, choreographer Miguel Gutierrez created myendlesslove (2006), a short, raw dance about grief. Brooklyn-based Gutierrez incorporates song, text, movement and video into his performance pieces.[9] The new version starts off with Mr. Gutierrez, in person, holding a discussion with himself on video: “What are you going to show us today?” “Whatever happens.” As the question is repeated, the response becomes more lascivious: “I really hope it’s going to look beautiful, that you’re going to try all the possible variations and positions.”[10]

When You Rise Up

A book of performance texts published by 53rd State Press. His language use is shaped by cinema and theater. In the texts, Gutierrez gets inside the psyche of the 20- or 30-something generation - people, according to Gutierrez, who often don’t know what to do with themselves, where to put their energies, or how to act “powerful” among others. Driving the performance texts is a socio-political conscience, though one hyper-attentive to the clichés of a socially committed, queer-inflected dance culture and public discourse.[11]

Publications

References

  1. ↑ LA Times article from 2011
  2. ↑ List of collaborators
  3. ↑ Miguel Gutierrez's personal bio
  4. ↑ http://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/grant_recipients/miguel.html
  5. ↑ "Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards". ddpaa.org. Retrieved 2016-05-06.
  6. ↑ Artist personal homepage
  7. ↑ New York Times Article about DEEP Aerobics
  8. ↑ Video documentation of DEEP Aerobics
  9. ↑ Art in America article by Lizzie Feidelson "Break-Up Dancing"
  10. ↑ New York Times Article "The Melancholy Effects of Growing Older in Gay Culture"
  11. ↑ Brooklyn Rail Article by Thomas Donovan "Everyone In This Room Is In This Fucking Dance"
  12. ↑ Purchase the book of performance texts: When You Rise Up
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