Residency Reflection: Courtney Mackedanz

It feels right to open the space with this confession: I have not missed performing for a moment over the course of the pandemic. It has felt like a prolonged unwinding toward ease to relinquish the version of my artistic perspective which imagines an audience witnessing each creative decision.

An even truer confession: It’s not really like I created work that was often presented to a public audience before the pandemic anyway—it’s just that what is new is the permission to rehearse for nothing actual—or maybe to rehearse for everything potential, honestly.

Anyway, the deepest confession that I think this space warrants: I would rehearse forever if you let me. I’ve never really decided what it means to be an “artist” who wants to practice more than they want to present, but let me tell you something that perhaps you already know: rehearsal can be a space of ever-newness in the right circumstance. Of course, it’s delicious to linger.

I’ve been in this kind of slow-pursuit // rehearsal-toward a project called CLUSTERFUQ for the past few years. CLUSTERFUQ is a seed that was probably planted in me a long time ago and began to sprout during a residency where I thought a lot about the choreography of interdependence in 2018. I explored this growing question via a brief incubator with a community of collaborators in 2019. And then (we all know the story) 2020 presented a portal for profound deepening and irrevocable transformation.

CLUSTERFUQ is a danced exploration of the way we move through wounds while in community, the strategies that embodied shapes offer to contain what might otherwise spill out//over and a literal rehearsal process for how to choreograph care into change over time. It’s now 2021, almost 2022, and I realize that maybe what I once imagined as a potential “project” is evolving toward a perpetual “process” — deliciously practiced again, and again, and again...

Below are a few glimpses into the process + examples of the kinds of prompts explored lately in generative co-choreographic rehearsals:

Co-Choreographed & Performed by:
solo_Courtney Mackedanz
duet_Shannon Shahinian & Tiana Thompson
trio_Molly Gehrmann, Lydia Jekot and Shannon Shahinian

Documentation & Editing support:
duet_Maxime Chudeau

Sound Design:
trio_Chris Wood

With previous production support from the Pivot Arts Incubator in partnership with Loyola University Dance Program (2019) and with gratitude to the Dance Center of Columbia College in partnership with the Walder Foundation for supporting ongoing development (2021).