THE REED COLLEGE DANCE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS:
TIFFANY MILLS COMPANY
IN A LECTURE-DEMONSTRATION FEATURING A PERFORMANCE OF THE FEAST (excerpts-in-progress)
When: Friday, March 28, 2014, 7 PM
Where: Reed College, Performing Arts Building, Performance Lab (PAB 128)
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd.
Portland, OR 97202-8199
Access: This event is free and open to the public.
Sponsors: Reed Dance Department, Weitkamp and Wolfe Funds
Information: www.reed.edu/dance/events
The Reed College Dance Department hosts choreographer-performer Tiffany Mills and her NYC-based company as guest artists in residence on campus March 25-30, 2014. On Friday, March 28 at 7 pm, the company will present a public lecture-demonstration including a performance of Mills’ recent work, The Feast (excerpts-in-progress). The Feast is driven by questions about abundance and scarcity: When are our lives exposed to the point of feeling devoured? How are our senses nourished or starved? Performed by six dancers (Jeffrey Duval, Kevin Ho, Kyle Marshall, Tiffany Mills, Emily Pope-Blackman, Mei Yamanaka), the work examines these themes in extreme environments of tight, dark, and high and spaces. The lush yet stark movement is heightened by composer Jonathan Melville Pratt’s aural landscape, which draws from a vast array of instruments—synthesizers, microphones, percussion, guitars, piano, and voice—layered on computer. Costumes are by Mary Kokie-McNaugher. This event is free and open to the public.
In addition to the lecture-demonstration, Mills will work with Reed students to create a scored improvisation, which they will perform later this spring. During their stay in Portland, Mills and her company will also present a workshop on Saturday, March 29, 4:30-6:30 pm immediately followed by an informal performance at 7 pm, at Conduit Dance Center.
Artistic director Tiffany Mills is a choreographer, teacher, and performer. She moved to NYC in 1995, and formed Tiffany Mills Company in 2000, earning praise from The New York Times: "Mills is making a name for herself as a young modern-dance innovator." Her work favors a boldly physical vocabulary, where vivid partnering plays a prime role in detailing human relations. In her crafted world of gesture, touch, and fluid form, Mills' dancers partner in three-dimensional explosions, syncopating space. The Tiffany Mills Company strikes a nerve - triggered by instinct - driven out of raw physicality. Her work focuses on human relationships and is grounded in partnering and improvisation. Under her direction, the Company investigates improvisational structures and partnering to create "violently visceral movement" (Village Voice) performed with a "fearless sense of freedom and exhilaration" (Washington Post). Intertwining complementary layers to her multi-dimensional work, Mills collaborates with her dancers, as well as contemporary theater directors, composers, designers, and filmmakers— most recently work filmmaker Ela Troyano, composers John Zorn and Ikue Mori, and experimental theater director Peter Petralia.
The Company’s collaborative work has been presented at: Brooklyn Academy of Music, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Art Festival (OR), Wexner Center for the Arts (OH), Contemporary Dance Theater/National Performance Network (OH), Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Residency Program (MA), Guggenheim Museum Works & Process Series, Duke on 42 Street, Symphony Space Dance Sampler, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Dancing in the Streets, Joyce SoHo, Danspace Project’s City/Dans Series, Dance New Amsterdam, Dance Theater Workshop Fresh Tracks, PS 122 Avant Garde Arama, Movement Research, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, HERE, Dance Place (DC), and internationally in Mexico, Canada and Russia. Mills’ guest teaching includes: Trisha Brown Studios, Dance New Amsterdam, Gibney Dance Center, and ACDFA. She has taught and set work at multiple universities and arts centers across the country.
Mills has received several grants, awards, and residencies including: BAM/PDP (12-13), Joyce Theater/Mellon Anchor Tenant Program (11-12), Baryshnikov Residency (10), DNA Residency (10), Brooklyn Arts Exchange Space Grant (09), Joyce Residency (07-08), Field Residency (08), LMCC Swing Space Residency (08-09), Bogliasco Foundation and Jerome Robbins Foundation Fellowships (Italy 07), Help Desk (05-06), HERE’s Artist Residency (02-03), Artistic Advisory Board of Dance/NYC (02-03), ACDFA Adjudicator (04, 07), Tribeca Performing Arts Center/LMCC Space Grant (05-06), Distinguished University of Oregon Alumni Award (05), Boekhelheide Creativity Award in Chemistry, Music and Dance from the UO School of Music and Dance (06), and Bates Dance Festival Emerging Choreographer Award (98). Her Company has received funding from: Evelyn Sharp Foundation, Harkness Foundation, Fund for Creative Communities, Department of Cultural Affairs, Brooklyn Arts Council, Bossak/Heilbron, Sorin Charitable Trust, Puffin Foundation, Manhattan Community Arts Fund, Meet the Composer, and American Music Center. Mills originally hails from Eugene, Oregon (BA University of Oregon, MFA Ohio State University).
The Tiffany Mills Company residency at Reed College is sponsored by the Dance Department, and is made possible with generous support from the Weitkamp and Wolfe Funds. The Feast is supported in part by The Joyce’s Mellon Anchor Tenant Program, The NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Grant. The Feast has also been supported via the inaugural session of BAM’s Professional Development Program, administered by BAM, in collaboration with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management (DVIAM) at the Kennedy Center.
For more information please visit: www.reed.edu/dance/events and www.tiffanymillscompany.org