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. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and Duke Health.
Photo by Emily Miller
Bloc
April 5th and 6th from 1 - 5pm daily.
500 West Rosemary St., Chapel Hill NC
Bloc is a trans-disciplinary social practice and community-centered art project linking poetry, movement, soundscape, storytelling, performance and education. It is also simply a practice of circling a place and noticing everything.
In partnership with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center and UNC’s Department of Geography and Environment, Culture Mill has worked with UNC faculty and students to examine oral history archives from Chapel Hill’s historically Black Northside neighborhood. Drawing on voices articulating community flourishing and imaginations past, present and future, artists R. Stein Wexler, Cortland Gilliam, Caitlyn Swett and Tommy Noonan have rendered archival fragments into an artistic map of a single city block at the threshold of Northside, downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
This map, which lives in the form of a linked poem, soundscape, installation and walking score, is meant to provide an alternative way to experience and understand a place understood through the transformative work done by the Northside Neighborhood Initiative, a broad-based partnership effort by neighbors to control the dirt in Northside so that residents might determine the future of the neighborhood directly. Bloc celebrates this grassroots work and considers how it might be scaled more broadly.
On April 5th and 6th from 1 to 5 pm, audiences and community members will be invited to experience the first iteration of Bloc. The installation can be visited free of charge, any time during the opening hours, though registration is appreciated.
Culture Mill’s collaboration “Bloc” is presented as part of Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts in partnership with The Marian Cheek Jackson Center and the UNC Department of Geography and Environment with support from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. This project is supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, A Division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Initial project development was supported thanks to an artist support grant from the Durham Arts Council, local grants administrator.
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.
The development of New Work by Caitlyn Swett is supported by a residency at the Culture Mill Lab. 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 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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