UCR Department of Dance
4QS: 4th Quarter MFA Dance Showings

INTO THE NIGHT

Works in Progress by Al Ellison, Priscilla Marrero, and Keisha Turner

Second Year MFA students at the University of California Riverside Experimental Choreography program will share a gesture of their research in their fourth quarter.

Committee Chairs: Joel Mejia Smith, Luis A. Lara Malvacías, and Ni'Ja Whitson

Friday, October 29, 2021
11am-12:30pm Pacific Daylight Time / 2pm-3:30pm Eastern Daylight Time
You are invited to an online showing - Register in advance here.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the showing.

Tuesday, November 2, 2021
11am-12:30pm Pacific Daylight Time / 2pm-3:30pm Eastern Daylight Time
Talkback Moderated by Dr. Anusha Kedhar
(Please email dance@ucr.edu to register for the talkback.)

Download Into the Night poster here.
Download Into the Night video poster here.

12 Dances by Al Ellison
Since Al began dancing at around 12 years old, she has been collecting dances. In this exploration “12 dances,” Al is interrogating the relationship between archive and impulse. Through going into memories of different choreography, Al is curious how activating movements from the past creates space for multiplicities of self in the now, while providing layers of meaning, healing and understanding nonlinearly through the embodied.

Al Ellison (she/her) is an artist from the unceded ancestral lands of the Wampanoag people, also known as the Fall River, Massachusetts area. Her research involves collaborating with the body as an archive and creating inside the potentials of what’s excavated through embodied inquiries. She loves working with “non-dancers” to renegotiate what it means to dance through activating the body’s knowledge to move, question, tell stories, create in spite of-, and heal. Al graduated with a BA in American Studies and minor in Dance from Tufts University (‘19). She is currently working on her MFA at University of California, Riverside and is a recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship.

La Pelvis Project by Priscilla Marrero
La Pelvis Project is an ongoing choreographic exploration on researching the importance of connecting with one’s own pelvis. Priscilla has been archiving movement invitations from the pelvis through improvisational experiments. By focusing on La Pelvis, we are giving it a voice, a moment to speak, a chance to shine.    

Priscilla Marrero is an experimental performing + teaching artista from sunny Seminole, Taino and Tequesta land, also known as Miami, Florida. She is a passionate storyteller and loves to discover new ways to collaborate with interdisciplinary artistas. She has performed and presented her work in the Musée Dapper (FR), The Empty Circle(NY), Miami Light Project (FL), Inkub8 (FL), Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church (NY) y más. Priscilla has a BA in Performance and Choreography from Florida International University and is currently pursuing an MFA for Experimental Choreography from the University of California Riverside (22’) with her research practice on La Pelvis.

Listen for the brake by Keisha Turner
Listen for the brake (working title) offers a glimpse into an ongoing study of how one might disentangle Black labor and Black work. It asks what disorientation has done and is doing to Black people- and what Black folks have done and are doing to disorientation. The publicly (and privately) held conversations, visioning labs, movement investigations, and Black be-ins that comprise Listen for the brake serve as opportunities for Black people to collaborate on crafting our liberation.

Keisha Turner (she/her), a performer, choreographer, educator, and root woman, was born and raised on Kiikaapoi, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Bodéwadmiakiwen, and Myaamia land, which has come to be known as Chicago.  She currently resides on unceded Chochenyo Ohlone territory in Oakland, CA where she is a creative change-maker and performance-maker. Her performance work activates ancient Afro-diasporic cultural wisdom and reimagines them in a contemporary context to conjure radical liberation for the lives of Black people, womxn, and the planet. Keisha holds a BFA with High Honors in Dance from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a second-year MFA candidate at University of California- Riverside, where her research centers on reparations, labor, Black liberation, and recovery from racial capitalism.

Information: dance@ucr.edu

These works are presented by the University of California, Riverside, Department of Dance and created in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts degree in Experimental Choreography.