Anatomy of Care

A new work in development by Murielle Elizéon in collaboration with a multigenerational cast living with and without Parkinson’s disease

Anatomy of Care, a developing work born out of Culture Mill’s Parkinson’s Performance Project (begun 2019), is a cross-sector dance project exploring how embodied care can be a catalyst for restoring agency, trust, and embodied imagination in collaboration with dancers living with PD, professional dancers, occupational therapists, and researchers. Anatomy of Care is a celebration of the ever-changing body, transformative power of attention and care, and resilience and strength born from inhabiting communal creative spaces while moving through the complexity of loss and grief. 

Anatomy of Care will be choreographed by Elizéon in collaboration with Clint Lutes (France) and Annie Dwyer (Durham, NC). A workshop series will be offered in partnership with ADF at their SHS Studios and with Croasdaile Village.

Anatomy of Care is a Culture Mill production. Living wage artist fees for Anatomy of Care are supported in part by the Mellon Foundation. This project is supported in part by Duke Health.

Photo by Emily Miller

Bloc

A site-specific performance-practice by Tommy Noonan, Cortland Gilliam, and Caitlyn Swett situated at the border of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, NC

Bloc is a forthcoming performance score and social practice that continues place-based investigations of story, history, and conflicting perceptions through the act of circling. Built from practices originating with Eclipse (2022) and a UNC Social Geography course culminating with Well (2023), both of which grappled with the legacy of white supremacy and UNC and uplifted the long history of Black masons in Chapel Hill and their relationship to the university built by enslaved labor, Bloc creates a container for a multiplicity of layered poetic and political imaginings and reflections that engages passers-by during a performance-practice and soundscape at the convergence of downtown Chapel Hill and UNC, Carrboro, and the Northside neighborhood.

A community engagement residency to deepen Bloc will take place as part of Culture Mill’s residency with Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts, an initiative that produces new works, collaborations, and research on social justice, racial equity, and the American South. Engagements will convene local and visiting artists, community members, and UNC students, faculty, and staff.

Noonan, Gilliam, and Dr. Betsy Olson of the UNC Geography Department are co-authoring a chapter about Eclipse and Social Geographies in a forthcoming book published by Vanderbilt Press. The trio also presented their lecture Bricks as Memory at the Nordic International Geographers Conference in Copenhagen in June 2024.

Bloc is a Culture Mill production. Culture Mill’s collaboration with CPA is presented as part of Southern Futures as Carolina Performing Arts. Living wage artist fees for Bloc are supported in part by the Mellon Foundation. This project was supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and Durham Arts Council, local grants administrator.

Photo by Iximché Media

 International Engagements

Murielle Elizéon and Tommy Noonan bring Culture Mill practices to creators across the world

In October 2024, Murielle Elizéon will travel to Tipperary Dance Festival in Ireland to facilitate SPLASH Lab, “a horizontal cooperative laboratory of practice to foster inspiring interaction among dance creators.” Elizéon’s lab will work with artists from France, Belgium/Greece, Ireland, and Brazil, inviting participants to engage with inquiries that will help shape generative ground for artistic practice and conversations. The invitation to facilitate SPLASH Lab increases opportunities to share Culture Mill’s practices, deepens connective tissue beyond residencies and performances abroad, and sparks new partnerships and artistic collaborations.

In February 2025, Tommy Noonan will travel to Hamburg, Germany along with 18 other artists from around the world to co-facilitate Attempt of Togetherness at the invitation of choreographer Jenny Beyer at Kampnagel, addressing the question of how transnational collaboration is possible today. Attempt of Togetherness strives to build networks of affection and to think and work collectively. The project will premiere as a performative installation at [K]ampnagel, Hamburg in February 2025. 

Attempt of Togetherness is a project by Sweet&Tender Collaborations. Initiated and produced by Jenny Beyer Productions in co-production with Mia Habib Productions (MHP) and Kampnagel Hamburg, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Ministry of Culture and the Media Hamburg, Arts Council Norway and the Culture Moves Europe programme of the European Union, implemented by the Goethe-Institut. It is conceptually docked to the three-year TANZPAKT Stadt-Land-Bund project TO GIVE–TO TAKE–TO NEED.

Photo by Pascal Boudet

 Residencies at Culture Mill Lab

Meeting grounds for artists and community to engage in artistic practice, creative process, and cross-pollination

The Culture Mill Lab will host residencies for artists near and far: 

Clint Lutes (Paris, France) will be in-residence in November 2024 as part of the Parkinson’s Performance Project, offering a series of trainings and engaging in the creation of Anatomy of Care. Cie Marie Lenfant (Le Mans, France) will return to the Lab for a February 2025 residency researching the transmission of dance, by way of “transmitting” solos to locally-based dancers, in the context of environmental and socio-economics crisis as it relates to touring dance. Amanda K. Miller (NC) will be in-residence screening Pears and documentary The Making of Two Pears (September 29), teaching an Imaginative Series: Landscape of Embodiment workshop, and entering a new creative process with Anna Maynard (NC). Caitlyn Swett (NC) will be in-residence to build a new multi-disciplinary work inhabiting personal and communal experiences of cancer survivorship as told by survivors themselves.

Numerous artists benefit from ongoing, cost-free use of the Culture Mill Lab as part of Culture Mill’s Open Space Policy and Open Space Residency programs. These programs gift use of the space to locally-based artists, removing financial barries to creative process.

Residencies at the Culture Mill Lab are made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation.

Photo by Emily Miller

 Rest, Reflection, and Reformation (RRR)

Embracing the pause so we may integrate what we have learned, missed, celebrate, and can dream in order to generate new pathways forward

Culturally, we engage in ideation, planning, and realization, but there is rarely a moment for reflection. To create time for rest, reflection, and reformulation (RRR) is to embrace the full lifecycle of a project. Following two seasons in 2022-23 and 2023-24, Barn Church, facilitated by Culture Mill and Kindred Seedlings Farm, will enter a RRR phase with collaborators and community. Barn Church is a liberatory and anti-racist project combining performance, shared meals, and practices of community care that centers BIPOC voices and embodied imagination.

Photo by Iximché Media

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