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.

Gillian Walsh is an artist and performer from Brooklyn, NY. Her work Moon Fate Sin (2017) was presented in the St. Mark’s Church sanctuary by Danspace Project & Performa. The work explored the death drive and transcendence in dance and the turn toward mysticism in times of global crisis.

Working with dance as a site of psychospiritual friction, Walsh produces long, meditative, highly formal choreographies. Though her works can be forbidding in their use of duration, stillness, emptiness, and repetition, they offer a sincere invitation to experience dance, time, and being together in new ways.

“Moon Fate Sin was guided by research into the kind of escape dance offers, a conception of dance as the meeting place between prayer and suicidal tendency,” Walsh says. “The next project, FAME NOTIONS (Performance Space New York, 2019) delved further into this line of research considering the alienation and spiritual quest of a dancer’s life. Here in 2021 I find myself deeper in this turn toward mysticism, thinking about God and the materiality of the body, as global crisis worsens. During this residency I’ll be developing a new ballet considering grief and new modes of transcendence. This process is informed by my theological studies and research I’ve been doing visiting various spiritual and holy sites across the U.S.”

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!