Miguel Gutierrez
New York, NY
Miguel Gutierrez is a dance and music artist based in Brooklyn. He makes solo and group work with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. In the US his work has been presented by Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, The Abrons Arts Center and The Kitchen, as well as ODC in San Francisco, the Walker Art Center, the Flynn Center in Vermont, DiverseWorks in Houston, and the Fusebox Festival. Internationally Gutierrez’s work has toured to several venues and festivals such as Antipodes Festival at Le Quartz in Brest, Politics of Ecstasy in Berlin, Kampnagel in Hamburg, Explore Festival in Bucharest, ImPulsTanz in Vienna and Springdance in Utrecht. He is a 2010 Fellow in Choreography from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, the National Performance Network Creative Commissioning Fund and New York Foundation for the Arts’ Fellowship and BUILD programs. He is a two time winner of the New York Dance and Performance ”Bessie” Award: in 2002 for dancing with John Jasperse Company and in 2006 as a choreographer for Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies. Gutierrez teaches regularly around the world and invented DEEP AEROBICS, an absurd(ist) workout for the leftist imagination-revolutionary in all of us. He has been lucky to work with a wide variety of extraordinary contemporary dance artists, such as Joe Goode, Juliette Mapp, Sarah Michelson, Jennifer Lacey, Deborah Hay and Alain Buffard.
Last Meadow
Miguel Gutierrez
Artist BioLast Meadow is an evening-length, three-part piece for three performers that mines movements and texts from James Dean’s three films to create a non-narrative patchwork that describes an America where the jig is up and the dream has died. The piece exploits the iconic and inherently misunderstood image of James Dean as a symbol of the ways in which we project unrealistic and outsized expectations onto each other and onto our identity as a nation. In agriculture, the “last meadow” is the one that receives the least amount of water from irrigation. In neurology, “last meadow” describes a kind of stroke in which the brain doesn’t receive enough blood thereby causing damage. Last Meadow is about the space of waiting, where what you need never comes.