Grant Wood Fellow Tony Orrico announces dance/visual artists, Matty Davis and Eryka Dellenbach, will be visiting the Dance Department Dec 2 through 6.
Matty will be guest teaching in MM2/3 on December 3rd and 5th (T/TH), 12:30-1:50pm. Concepts will accumulate throughout the two days. Any students who are not enrolled in the class, but wish to participate, need to commit to both days, and they should email Tony ahead of time (anthony-orrico@uiowa.edu) to confirm.
Matty, Eryka, and Tony will be researching new material in the studio. All who are interested in observing elements of the mini residency should email Tony for more information. He also encourage any students who may be interested in dance and film to consider scheduling a time to meet Eryka, who works with 16mm, 35mm still, and digital video in tandem with visual and performance work (butoh, partnering and improvisation).
Click on the link below to preview of "Carriage," and collaboration between Matty and performer, Ben Gould, with videography by Eryka.
(Please use headphones) Emerging from new, evolving conditions of their bodies, Matty Davis and Ben Gould engage physicalized forms of resistance and balance that confound care, provocation, and necessity, ultimately inducing a slow evaporation of control.
Matty Davis is an artist and choreographer originally from Pittsburgh, where his grandfather worked in the steel mills and his dad’s plane crashed. These histories have been meaningful impetuses for his work as regards the body and its relationship to memory, intimacy, labor, and technology.
He grew up as a multi-sport athlete, which exposed him to visceral experiences of surface, injury, resilience, and play that continue to influence his interdisciplinary practice. Often collaborative—with other people, the land, and histories—his work begins with movement, mining and cultivating the body’s resources. Empathy, trust, coordination, and energy become key improvisational tools for the navigation of unpredictable relationships and undertakings. In constant dialogue, the body marks the world and the world marks it, amidst an ongoing search for transformation and connection.
While centered on performances that take place in a wide range of settings--from theaters to Mt. Whitney, from backyards to the Ouachita National Forest--his work spans drawing, sculpture, video, and books. It has been presented by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Palais de Tokyo, the Max Ernst Museum, Printed Matter, Pioneer Works, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, Steppenwolf Theater, and the 92nd St. Y, among others. In addition to his own work, he has performed works with or by Hito Steyerl, Guido van der Werve, David Hallberg, Francesco Vezzoli, and Tino Sehgal. In 2016, Davis was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and in 2019 was named 1 of 25 Artists to watch by Dance Magazine. He has enjoyed teaching masterclasses and workshops at various institutions throughout the US, including New York University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the Kansas City Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Oberlin College, and Kenyon College. He currently lives in Brooklyn, maintains a studio in Peekskill, NY, and is most often working outside somewhere.
Eryka Dellenbach is a dancer, performer, filmmaker and researcher born and raised in Chicago. Her work is guided by a consideration of the threshold as both a location of consciousness, and as the realm of malleability in corporeal limitation.