Florida State University’s Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography has been awarded a second round of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support creative laboratories for emerging dance artists and their collaborators.
The MANCC Forward Dialogues (MFD) program is a laboratory designed to support and catalyze the ideas of emergent movement-based artists by providing access to a stimulating environment that encourages experimentation, exploration and lifelong learning.
“It’s a great honor to have the national field recognize our work through this NEA award,” said Carla Peterson, director of MANCC. “We are proud of MANCC’s Forward Dialogues program, as it is vital to our field that we continue to identify and support the next generation of choreographic voices. We look forward to welcoming our new cohort of MFD artists to our campus in 2019.”
The $40,000 NEA Art Works grant follows the center’s successful launch of the MANCC Forward Dialogues pilot program in 2017.
With this renewed funding, MANCC will facilitate the program for a second time in Spring 2019. MFD will continue to support emerging choreographers as they partner with another creative artist of their choice — in dance or another field — to establish or push further a generative artistic relationship.
The lab, facilitated by leaders in the field of dance and performance, is a 14-day, process-oriented immersion that develops, examines and allows for the articulation of the participants’ nascent choreographic voices.
In addition, MANCC has been awarded funding from the Sustainable Arts Foundation (SAF), which supports artists with children. For many parents the financial, emotional, and logistical demands of raising a family make attending a traditional artist residency program impossible. The foundation provides funding to allow residency programs, such as MANCC, to make their programs more accessible to parent artists. MANCC will use these funds to assist artists with costs relating to child care during their time in Tallahassee.
“MANCC has been supporting parent artists since 2004,” said Ansje Burdick, managing director of MANCC. “This funding now allows us to take our support to the next level by covering the real costs parent artists incur when they enter in to residency.”
MANCC, embedded within FSU’s School of Dance, offers unparalleled opportunities for contemporary choreographers to hone their artistic practice and develop new work inside a creative community.