BMC Dance

Performances and conversations with choreographers Eleanor Hullihan, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener and Mina Nishimura
Saturday, August 5, 2023
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
TICKETS – $15 General Admission / $10 BMCM+AC members + Students w/ID

11am roundtable conversation
7pm performances*

Part of the BMCM+AC Performance Initiative

This event brings together accomplished dance artists Eleanor Hullihan, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener, and Mina Nishimura for a series of performances and conversations that examine Black Mountain College’s continuing influence on the world of dance. Join us for a roundtable conversation at 11am and dance performances beginning at 7pm.

BMC Dance is curated by Eleanor Hullihan.

Photo gallery:

Performances:

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener 
Performed by Mitchell and Riener, this performance draws from their embodied “Desire Lines” practice that combines movement, vocalization, and object manipulation into site-responsive, community-oriented performance installations. A desire line in landscape architecture refers to an unofficial route or social trail that breaks protocol with prescribed pathways, sometimes the shortest distance between two points, sometimes simply a good way to follow one’s curiosity. Desire lines represent an accumulated record of transformation in public space, a model for a permissive dance-making process that invites us to reimagine the self and its environment.

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener are New York-based dance artists. Their work involves the building of collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. They met as dancers in the Merce Cunningham Dance company and since 2010 they have created over 25 multidisciplinary dance works including site-responsive installations, concert dances, gallery performances and dances for film in venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barbican Centre, REDCAT, The Walker Art Center, and MoMA/PS1. Throughout they have maintained a commitment to queer culture and aesthetics. Their partnership intentionally blurs authorship and maintains a deep commitment to collaboration with a diverse community of dancers, performers, artists and cultural institutions.

Rashaun Mitchell graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2000 and since then has worked with many artists including: Chantal Yzermans, Donna Uchizono, Pam Tanowitz, Risa Jaroslow, Sara Rudner, Jonah Bokaer, Richard Colton, Deborah Hay, and Rebecca Lazier. He has received numerous awards: a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Princess Grace Award: Dance Fellowship (2007), a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for sustained achievement in the work of Merce Cunningham 2004-2012 (2011), a Bessie for “Outstanding Emerging Choreographer” (2012), and a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art (2013). He is a Cunningham Fellow and licensed stager of the repertory. His choreography has been presented in NYC by Danspace Project, Baryshnikov Arts Center, LMCC, La Mama Moves Festival, Mount Tremper Arts, Skirball Center at NYU, the Museum of Arts and Design, and at numerous venues and universities throughout the East Coast. He has been on faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and was a full-time Professor of Dance at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. In 2013 Mitchell and Riener were listed in Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” and were selected for LMCC”s inaugural Extended Life Dance Development Program.

Silas Riener is a graduate of Princeton University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 2007-2012. He has performed with Chantal Yzermans, Takehiro Ueyama, Christopher Williams, Joanna Kotze, Jonah Bokaer, Rebecca Lazier, Tere O’Connor, Wally Cardona, and Kota Yamazaki. His own work has been curated at EMPAC, The Chocolate Factory, LMCC’s River to River Festival, The Serpentine Pavillion, and Danspace Project. His ongoing collaboration with artist Martha Friedman has resulted in works at Andrea Rosen Gallery 2, The Henry Museum, Locust Projects Miami, and Jessica Silverman Gallery.