Miguel Gutierrez, Lewis Center for the Arts

Visiting Lecturer in Dance; Hearst Choreographer-in-Residence Named in 20-21

Photo by Marley Trigg Stewart

About

Miguel Gutierrez (creator, performer, music and text) is a choreographer, composer, performer, singer, writer, educator, and advocate who has lived in New York for over 20 years. He is fascinated by the time-based nature of performance and how it creates an ideal frame for phenomenological questions around presence and meaning-making. His work proposes an immersive state for performer and audience alike, wherein attention itself becomes an elastic material. He believes in an approach to art making that is fierce, fragile, empathetic, political, and irreverent.

In recent years Gutierrez has considered how he negotiates his queer Latinx identity within the traditions of the white avant-garde. This inquiry led to This Bridge Called My Ass, a piece that bends tropes of Latinidad to identify new relationships to content and form. Gutierrez’s work has been presented in more than 60 cities around the world, in venues such as the Centre national de la danse (CND), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Festival Universitario, ImPulsTanz, Fringe Arts, Walker Art Center, TBA/PICA, MCA Chicago, Live Arts Bard (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), American Realness, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Gutierrez is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including support from MAP Fund, New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, NPN, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and United States Artists. In 2016 Gutierrez received a Franky Award from the PRELUDE festival and has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards. He is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist.

Gutierrez has been an artist in residence at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Institut Chorégraphique International—Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier (France), CND, Baryshnikov Arts Center (New York), and Gibney Dance. He has created original music for several of his own works and for Antonio Ramos, as well as for Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony in collaboration with Colin Self. Gutierrez also performs in the duo Nudity in Dance with Nick Hallett and in a current music project called SADONNA, which presents sad versions of upbeat Madonna songs. His book of performance texts, When You Rise Up (2009), is available from 53rd State Press, and his essay “Does Abstraction Belong to White People” appeared in BOMB magazine in 2018. He is currently developing a new TV show with his sister, Margarita Gutierrez, called Boca, about the impact of a father’s brain trauma on his immigrant family.

Gutierrez has taught regularly at a variety of festivals and intensive workshops worldwide, including Forum Dança (Portugal), La Caldera (Barcelona, Spain), ImPulsTanz, CND’s Camping, Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation, Lion’s Jaw performance + dance festival (Boston), American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival (Bates College, Lewiston, ME), MELT at Movement Research (New York), Earthdance (Plainfield, MA), Danza Común (Bogotá), New Aesthetics (Vancouver, Canada), Performática (Puebla, Mexico), and Ponderosa (Stolzenhagen, Denmark), and he has been a visiting guest professor at several universities including DOCH School of Dance and Circus (Stockholm); Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design (Stockholm); Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (Brussels); Bennington College (VT); Hollins University’s MFA program in dance (Roanoke, VA); School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program; Yale University’s MFA program in Sculpture (New Haven, CT); Rhode Island School of Design (Providence); Brown University (Providence, RI); Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh); University of California Los Angeles; Princeton University (NJ); California Institute of the Arts (Santa Clarita); Center for Advanced Study at University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign); The Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School (New York); New York University Tisch School of the Arts’s Experimental Theater Wing; Hunter College (New York); and many more.

He is the program director for LANDING, a community-building, non-academic educational initiative at Gibney Dance. He invented DEEP AEROBICS (Death Electric Emo Protest Aerobics) in 2007, disseminated it for 10 years, and then killed it in 2017. He is also a Feldenkrais Method® practitioner.