Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener on Making New Dance Work

Collaborators Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener (2023 Creative Capital Awardees) unpack how they created Open Machine, a new choreographic work supported by Creative Capital, with a cast of nine dancers and real-time audiovisual description, virtual renderings, and live video. They will share insights into the creative process with REDCAT Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Performing Arts Katy Dammers and discuss how creative, technological, and budgetary parameters evolved the piece. Takeaways from the session may include practices for developing a new dance work with new technologies, resourcing the piece, working with presenters, and tips on running a self-managed tour.

About the Contributors

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener are New York-based dance artists. Their ongoing work involves the building of collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. They are Guggenheim Fellows and Bessie award recipients who make work in deep dialogue with sites and performers. Their collaborative process involves the blurring of a professional and romantic relationship. Two very different sensibilities and experiences of race and culture synthesize and clash in ways that suggest comparative models for how to co-exist, assimilate or rebel in society.

Katy Dammers is the Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Performing Arts at REDCAT, CalArts’ center for the visual and performing arts in Los Angeles. Her curatorial practice presents, organizes, and contextualizes contemporary practice in performance commissions, exhibitions, festivals, site-specific installations, and publications. She has held past leadership positions at The Kitchen, FringeArts, and Jacob’s Pillow. Dammers has also worked as a creative administrator, and worked with choreographers Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener as General Manager from 2014-2022, in addition to organizing projects with Jennifer Monson, Donna Uchizono, and Tere O’Connor. A writing fellow at the National Center for Choreography Akron, her essays have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Motor Dance Journal, and MOLD as well as edited volumes by University of Akron Press and Princeton University Press.