Perspectives on Performance with Miguel Gutierrez

am i a body or a thing

In this talk, Miguel Gutierrez will discuss the development of his choreographic work and the tension between visual representation and affect. He will focus on how he approaches archive, reconstruction, intentional corruption, multi-directionality and melodrama in his work, particularly in his recent performance Super Nothing.

About Miguel Gutierrez

Miguel Gutierrez is a multi-disciplinary dance artist and Feldenkrais Method practitioner living between Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY and Tovaangar/Los Angeles. His work continues and expands the legacy of experimental QTPOC artists and creates empathetic, irreverent, and reflective spaces that prioritize attention as a means to unravel normative belief systems. Recent performance work includes Super Nothing, a dance blueprint for queer survival developed as the Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, and Frankenstein, a dance created for visual artist Avram Finkelstein as part of his solo show at Smack Mellon. 

His performances have been presented internationally in venues such as Festival d’Automne,  Centre National du Danse and Centre Pompidou in Paris, Montpellier Danse Festival, Festival Universitario/Bogotá and Barranquilla, ImpulsTanz in Vienna, BiPod Festival in Beirut, and Festival Transameriques in Montreal, among many others. In the United States, he has been presented in venues such as Fringe Arts/Philadelphia, Walker Art Center/Minneapolis, Wexner Center for the Arts/Columbus, TBA Festival-PICA/Portland, MCA Chicago, Live Arts Bard, and in New York at The Kitchen, Live Arts, BAM, Danspace Project, Abrons Art Center, The Chocolate Factory, and American Realness. He was a selected artist for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. From 2007-2017 he led his absurdist workout form DEEP AEROBICS and in 2013/14 it was used as the warmup act for The Knife’s Shaking the Habitual world tour. In 2017, he created Cela nous concerne tous/This concerns all of us as a commissioned work for Ballet de Lorraine, a contemporary dance company in France, and he created the choreography for Every Ocean Hughes’ 2021 film ONE BIG BAG, which has exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. His dance Aerobicon, was filmed and used as the music video for Le Tigre’s Deceptacon, and went viral, spawning some of the first copycat videos on YouTube.

He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, four NY Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist Award, and a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award. He has received project support from Cafe Royal Foundation, the Josephine Foundation, Dance NYC, Bossak Heilbron Charitable Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network, MAP Fund, and the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project.

His work is discussed in several publications, including Performance Now: Live Art for the Twenty-First Century by Roselee Goldberg (Thames & Hudson, 2018), The Choreographic by Jenn Joy (MIT Press, 2014), and Becomings: Pregnancy, Phenomenology, and Postmodern Dance by Johanna Kirk (Routledge, 2024). He has contributed essays to A Life in Dance (ed. Rebecca Stenn and Fran Kirmser, CreateSpace, 2017) and In Terms of Performance: A Keywords Anthology (ed. Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola, The Pew Center & UC Berkeley, 2016). 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” is one of the most viewed writings at BOMB magazine online. He has also been published by Small Press Traffic’s The Back Room, InDance Magazine, Creative Time, Entanglements, a monograph on Luke George and Daniel Kok’s performance work, and is a contributor to Sluts, the first anthology from Dopamine Books. His podcast Are You For Sale? examines his long standing interest in the ethical entanglements between money and art making. 

He has created music for several of his own works and for other choreographers such as Antonio Ramos and in collaboration with Colin Self for Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit. He has performed as a singer with Anohni, Holcombe Waller, Vincent Segal, Nick Hallett, and My Robot Friend. His music project, SADONNA, where he transforms upbeat Madonna songs into sad anthems, has toured internationally since 2017. He also creates and performs original songs through his project sueño.  

Miguel has served as visiting lecturer and guest artist at Bennington College, CalArts, Hollins University, Yale University, Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Hunter College, UCSD, New York University/Tisch School of the Arts and Carnegie Mellon University. He has created works for students at University of Colorado/Boulder, George Washington University, Goucher College, Hollins University, University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, University of North Texas, University of New Mexico, and in Stockholm at DOCH. He has also taught in many dance programs around the world, such as Movement Research, CAMPING at the Centre National du Danse, ici Montpellier, ImPulsTanz, and Bates Dance Festival. In 2016 he created LANDING, a non-academic educational initiative that runs through 2019. Gutierrez was the 2020-2021 Caroline Hearst Choreographer in Residence at Princeton University.

He is an Associate Professor of Choreography at UCLA in the department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.  He holds a BA with honors in Theater and Performance Studies/Dance from Brown University and an MFA in studio art from the School of Art Institute of Chicago.www.miguelgutierrez.org