Trillium Arts is delighted to announce the recipients of its second annual ACE (Asheville/Chicago Exchange) Fellowship in Dance. Three Fellowships are being awarded in 2021 to Carrie Hanson, Ayako Kato and Nejla Yatkin. These outstanding artists were selected by invitation.

“The 2021 ACE Fellows were selected based on their artistic merit and the quality of the exciting projects they will further while here at Trillium,” states Phil Reynolds, Trillium Arts President. “Their projects deeply connect with Trillium’s core values and belief that the arts can foster positive change in addressing complex problems such as climate change and social justice.” Trillium is delighted to support their important work and can’t wait to see what grows out of these ACE Fellowships this September!

MEET THE ARTISTS

CARRIE HANSON
www.theseldoms.org

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Carrie Hanson is a choreographer, dance educator, and Artistic Director of The Seldoms. She creates performance charged by bold, exacting physicality and fueled by research in history, environment, and science. Since founding The Seldoms in 2002, she has designed projects with practitioners of visual arts, theater, music/sound design, fashion, and architecture. The multimedia works are visually expansive, adventurous, intellectually-muscular productions on topics such as the 2008 recession, climate change, and power and powerlessness in America. Hanson was Chicago Tribune’s 2015 “Chicagoan of the Year in Dance”, honored for her “brawny, brainy movement”. Her 2015 work about Lyndon Johnson, Power Goes, received a National Performance Network Creation Fund and NEFA National Dance Project Award, and toured to ten US venues, engaging a community cast in each city. Under her direction, The Seldoms has toured nationally, to Russia, Taiwan, and Scotland, and designed performance in spaces including a Chicago Landmark fieldhouse and a truck depot. Time Out Chicago called her work in an outdoor pool, Giant Fix, one of the “best dance moments of the past decade”. She has been commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Texas Performing Arts, the Morton Arboretum, and the National Theater of Mannheim, Germany. She was a 2015 resident at the National Center for Choreography Akron and Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence at UW-Madison in Fall 2019. Hanson has received two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, a Ruth Page Award, was a Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum Lab Artist and one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012. She teaches at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, holds a BFA from Texas Christian University, and an MA in Dance Studies from Laban London.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“My creative work with The Seldoms has addressed issues at the intersection of environmental and social justice, within multimedia productions about climate change and our climate crisis, plastics pollution, and most recently, the American obsession with two kinds of grass – turfgrass and cannabis. I believe that dance—an assertion of the fluent, articulate body as a viable means of knowing about our world— can get us closer to essential truths about our relationship to one another and to our place in the ecosystem. While at Trillium, in its barn studio and abundant green spaces, my dancers and I will explore a new project whose starting point is the indigenous concept of “dish with one spoon”, which instructs a limited use of natural resources in order to share equitably and to allow continued abundance. We are grateful to Heather and Phil for their vision and work in bringing artists into this secluded, verdant space.”

Carrie will be in residence with three of her ensemble dancers, Dee Alaba, Sarah Gonsiorowski and Damon D. Green, and collaborator/photographer Andrew Glatt from September 9-18.

AYAKO KATO
ayakokatodance.com

Called “moving everyday sculptures, artfully cast in naturalness” (Luzerner Zeitung, Switzerland), Ayako Kato founded Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape in 1998 and is active as a choreographer, dancer, and educator. Her work embodies the principles of furyu, Japanese for “wind flow”, cyclical transformation in nature. Collaborating with more than sixty musician-composers, she has toured throughout the US, Japan, and Europe. Most recently, she received the Illinois Arts Council 2021 Artist Fellowship Award in Choreography. Her work was also recognized as Best of Dance by the Chicago Tribune and SeeChicagoDance, and highly acclaimed by the New York Times, Village Voice, and Chicago Reader. Newcity Stage also chose her as one of the “Fifty People Who Really Perform For Chicago''. She has been supported by fellowships from High Concept Labs, a Links Hall Co-MISSION program, 3Arts Residencies at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, a 3Arts Award, the Meier Achievement Award, the Reva & David Logan Foundation, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the Chicago Moving Company, and a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award, Constellation, Experimental Sound Studio, Elastic Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the MCA Chicago, and the Chicago Park District which will present her work Inception: ETHOS Episode II at South Shore in October 2021.

Photo by Ralph Kuehne

ARTIST STATEMENT

“In the heart of nature's bounty, I plan to attune my dancers' and my own body and mind for the upcoming outdoor dance and music installation performance Inception: ETHOS Episode II on October 11, Indigenous Peoples' Day, which will take place throughout the 65-acre South Shore Cultural Center Park. Seeking humanity's common ancestral origin and ethical orientation, dancers and I are looking forward to letting go and opening up to further perceive and solidify the intangible and invisible fundamental ground for the unity and equilibrium. Thank you so much, Trillium Arts, for inviting us!”

Ayako and five Chicago based dancers, Tuli Bera, Lesley Keller, Amanda Maraist, Danielle Ross and Darling Shear will be at Trillium from September 19-26.

NEJLA YATKIN
ny2dance.com/

Described by The New York Times as "a magician, telling tales and creating worlds" and "a fierce and supple performer," Chicago-based choreographer Nejla Yatkin travels around the globe inspiring empathic connection between people and their environments. She creates solos, choreographs ensemble dances for stages and sites, collaborates on plays and film/video projects, and educates young artists. She is the recipient of multiple grants and awards from the Princess Grace Foundation, the Jay Pritzker Foundation, the Turkish Cultural Foundation, the National Performance Network, 3Arts, the Chicago Dancemakers Forum, the Illinois Arts Council, and the City of Chicago, among others.

Nejla hails from Germany and weaves multiple cultural influences into choreographic tapestries of her own design. She explores multifaceted identities in solo creations including What Dreams May Come (2015), an evening-length multimedia piece that explores the spaces between felt and perceived selves with video and original music; it has toured in Latin America, India, Africa, and Russia with support from the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Princess Grace Foundation. Nejla's new solo project, The Other Witch—a multi-lingual hybrid performance/installation/documentary in response to Wigman’s Hexentanz —exploring Otherness from the perspective of the Other —is supported by the Chicago Dancemakers Lab Award, the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), and the Chicago Cultural Center.

Nejla's transcultural ensemble dances take place in theaters and outdoors. For her 2015 project Dancing Around The World, she travelled to a new country every two weeks to guide community groups in choreographies that surprised and intrigued audiences in urban spaces. The piece traveled to 20 cities internationally since its premiere; a record of the project created with videographer Enki Andrews was awarded the 2018 Silver Palm Award for Best Documentary Short Film by the Mexico International Film Festival. Nejla has choreographed stage works for major contemporary dance and theater companies including the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, Dallas Black Dance Theater, Abingdon Theater, Open Door Theater, and the Washington Ballet; recent projects such as Moving Nature Dreams (2019) and Conference of the Birds (2018) are designed to activate nature areas and parks.

Nejla also shares her deep love and knowledge of dance through teaching. Her body is an encyclopedia of contemporary masterworks: As a principal dancer with Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble she has interpreted works by seminal choreographers José Limon, Donald McKayle, Kathrerine Dunham, Anzu Furukawa, Pina Bausch, and Jiri Kylian. Her technical expertise enfolds Japanese Butoh Dance, Middle Eastern dance forms, pantomime, and acting techniques. Nejla earned tenure while serving as a Professor of Dance at University of Maryland, College Park; she has also taught and created with students at Harvard University, Northwestern University, SUNY Purchase, Webster University, Washington University, University of Notre Dame, and many others. In all her endeavors, Nejla seeks what British philosopher Isaiah Berlin refers to as an “awareness of the deep currents” — a comprehension of the connection between all people.

Photo of “The Other Witch” by Enki Andrews

ARTIST STATEMENT

“Through dance, I seek what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin refers to as an “awareness of the deep currents” — a comprehension of the connection between all things, an awareness of the present as well as that which transcends time and space.

My dances manifest in theatrical dance pieces, durational performance installations, public sites in Nature and cities and short experimental films. My dances examine the body’s connection to place, space and other bodies through embodied memory and I create within a framework of my multi-lingual/cultural context that comes from living in three different continents. During my week, I will listen to, observe and stay open to the natural surroundings of Trillium Arts to be my inspiration.”

Nejla will be in residence from September 4-11 with a cohort of collaborators: Chicago based videographer Enki Andrews, and three Charlotte, NC based artists, composer Shamou and Movement Migration dance artists Kim Jones and Alyce Cristina Vallejo, to playfully discover new ways of seeing, hearing and moving with the world.