This March, three LA-based choreographers will present their work through Dance Resource Center’s HOME GROWN @ Bootleg series. DRC’s Home Grown program targets artists who are ready to self-produce their work but who may be overwhelmed by the technical challenges and lack of resources that stand in the way of producing high-level work. HOME GROWN aims to be a platform for overcoming those challenges.
Rebecca Bryant. Photo courtesy of HOME GROWN @ Bootleg.
“There are few platforms outside of the festival and showcase format through which artists can take a deeper dive in their own artistic process and show more than a five-minute piece, but less than a 90-minute body of work,” says Alex Mathews, associate director of DRC. “While festivals and showcases are a great stepping stone in the dance world, it’s difficult to know where to go next and guarantee an audience following.”
According to Mathews, HOME GROWN offers a collaborative presentation process where dance makers share the production process while attracting bigger, more diverse audiences that can potentially help artists broaden their presence within the LA dance community.
HOME GROWN @ Bootleg, March 10-12, will feature works by Rebecca Bryant, Ami Mattison and Maritza Navarro, a diverse group of dance makers “who would not typically intersect or voluntarily choose to share the stage,” says Mathews.
“They are each representative of different experience levels and vary in aesthetics, ranging from more commercial dance influences to more academic and artistic influences,” she says. “It’s great to see how they are each open and eager to come together, try something different and support one another along the way.”
Rebecca Bryant, an independent dance maker with a visual art background, is a faculty member at California State University, Long Beach. She will present MANUFACTURED, an 18-minute dancework combining contemporary/post-modern dance with text and objects, which includes 50 small cardboard boxes. Bryant acknowledges the important role that DRC and the HOME GROWN program plays in communicating to the far reaches of the varied, often insular, communities in the LA dance scene.
Mattidance. Photo courtesy of HOME GROWN @ Bootleg.
Ami Mattison of Mattidance Company and Maritza Navarro both agree that one of the best benefits of participating in HOME GROWN is time.
Navarro says, “The challenge to create such an extended piece of work challenged me to look at my process differently. In the past, with commercial or commissioned work, I usually created the bulk of my movement alone, under a time constraint and set the work on dancers or actors in rehearsal with minimal adjustments and small room for improvisation and improvement on body types. Having a longer period of time to call my own, with work that is strictly mine, forced me to be a little more introspective about what my process is and what my movement means to me.”
Navarro will present Crossing Over, an expansion of what was originally a solo about faith, and Mattidance Company will show its new work, Deviate, “a series of vignettes that explore the line between normal and abnormal behavior, thought, emotion and perception.”
For more information and for tickets to HOME GROWN @ Bootleg, click here.
By Katherine Moore of Dance Informa.
Photo (top): Maritza Navarro. Photo courtesy of HOME GROWN @ Bootleg.
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