Renewal Residencies: Mina Nishimura
This year-long residency program will take place at Danspace Project’s home at St. Mark’s Church beginning in August 2021. The residencies will continue all year with public engagement, artistic dialogue, research, and space support.
Mina Nishimura’s Bladder Inn (and X, Y, Z, W), presented by Danspace Project in 2018, invited audiences and performers to consider peripheral spaces of architecture, perception, and sound specific to the architecture of Danspace Project’s home at St. Mark’s Church. While in-residence, she will be working on a new piece, currently titled Mapping a Forest while Searching for an Opposite Term of Exorcist.
“Exploring an anarchic body, which pierces holes in the wholeness of a thing, I would like to re-imagine a way of organizing a body and a space where multiple energies, traits, memories, and identities are fluidly bubbling up and disappearing,” writes Nishimura. “During my Renewal Residency, I will re-imagine, sketch, compose, and build a new visual landscape using objects, fabrics, drawings, and bodies at St. Mark’s Church.”
“I would like to see how my movement practice of an anarchic body meets a re-imagined landscape. After spending some time alone in the space, a few other dancers will be invited for the exploration.” Nishimura will invite a writer and a photographer to document and map the new landscape and ever-evolving and disappearing process during her residency.
The inaugural 2021-2022 Renewal Residency artists are Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Mina Nishimura, Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez and Gillian Walsh. This open and flexible program is an urgent and necessary response to the needs of these artists this year. Renewal Residencies emphasize: recuperation time to create work without the immediate pressure of production; renewed connection to creative process and artistic research; renewed connection to collaborators and fellow artists; and renewed connection to the Danspace Project community. Renewal Residencies attempt to make up for vital time lost, supporting the development of new work in dance.
Each artist will be invited to contribute to Danspace’s online Journal and to participate in Danspace’s virtual Conversations Without Walls series. Visit danspaceproject.org for more info and updates!
Mina Nishimura, from Tokyo, was introduced to butoh and improvisational dance through Kota Yamazaki. After studying at Merce Cunningham Studio, she has performed with a number of NY-based choreographers, in most years, such as Yausko Yokoshi, John Jasperse, Dean Moss, Neil Greenburg, Vicky Shick, Nami Yamamoto, and Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener. Her other performance credits includes; MiuMiu/PRADA film directed by Celia-Rowlson Hall; Late Sea’s MV; and for SIA’s “Bird Set Free” “Alive” on Saturday Night Live. Her own choreographic works have been commissioned by NYU Skirball Center, Danspace Project, Gibney Dance, Mount Tremper Arts Center, UC Davis and among other dance organizations. Her latest work “Disappearing Altogether” premiered at Sarah Lawrence College last May. Nishimura is a recipient of Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award 2019, and was a cover artist in the May issue of Dance Magazine 2021. Nishimura completed her MFA at Bennington College in 2021, and currently teaches at the school.