re:FRAME: Every Body Dance Now

Ann Glaviano is a writer, dance-maker, DJ, and born-and-raised New Orleanian. Since 2013 Ann has directed the New Orleans-based performance project Known Mass, which is an ongoing collaboration between New Orleans dancers and artists in other disciplines, aesthetically and ethically motivated by devised-theatre and DIY performance traditions. Ann recruits professional dancers, the ultra-classically trained and the twenty-first-century contemporary weirdos, to perform alongside Ultimate Frisbee athletes and roller-derby bruisers; she invites musicians who are typically more oriented to the rock-club scene to create lush noisescapes for the dancers to inhabit. The resulting pieces tend to be preoccupied with community – how it’s built and how it’s dismantled – and foreground the fine line between the banal and the absurd, playing out with both humor and poignancy what the writer and dance-maker Deborah Hay calls “the full, the sensuous, and the completely unremarkable.” From 2013 to 2019 Ann has produced and directed 11 collaborative projects with local dancers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists.

As a freelance dancer Ann has performed with the New Orleans Ballet Theatre and the New Orleans Opera Association, among many others. She has choreographed for Hulu’s television show The First, an episode directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven (Mustang). Ann’s dance film 01_fieldrecording had its world premiere in January 2019 at Highways, an experimental performance art venue in Los Angeles, selected for the inaugural event of their MOTION CAPTURE series. In February 2019 she was an Associate Artist in Residence with the legendary Deborah Hay at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In March 2019 her solo work was presented at COAST DANCEfest in Ocean Springs. Most recently (September 2019) she performed in a dystopic faux-corporate durational art installation in Dresden, Germany.

A student of Karl Rogers and Eric Nordstrom, Ann hosts and guest-teaches contact improv classes and jams in New Orleans and beyond. She administered the (currently on hiatus) Vector Series of technique, improv, and phrasework classes for professional dancers through Known Mass.

Jeremy Guyton is a dancer, choreographer, and teaching artist currently serving as the Youth Programs Director at Dancing Grounds. A Los Angeles native, he attended Georgetown University where he received a B.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies in 2012. Most recent credits include Foreign to Myself (Goat in the Road Productions) and Gomela/ to return (Junebug Productions).

Through juxtaposing choreographic, cinematic and live art practices, Meryl creates works that emphasize interactivity and intimacy as radical acts. Meryl’s process reflects her Arab-American diasporic lineage emphasizing hybridity and the Levantine tradition of bridging cultures while insisting on the imagination as a site of resistance and liberation. Her passion and dedication to human rights scholarship and unwavering belief in somatic movement and creative expression as tools for healing has led her, through support from the US Embassy, to work on human rights focused projects exploring sexual liberation, gender discrimination, and the affects of assimilation and migration on the body with female and LGBTQ refugees: through a fellowship in 2018 in Kyiv, Ukraine with IZOLYATSIA Platform for Cultural Initiative, and currently with FIX-in Art NGO in Thessaloniki, Greece, where she is directing an on-going somatic therapy program for female identifying and three interactive public live art works, Heart Speaks, to engage the public in critical conversations around sexual and gender based violence. Her art has been presented in Germany, South Africa, Greece, Spain, UK and France. Her research was published in becoming-Botanical by Objet-a Creative Studio in Glasgow Scotland 2019, and her essay Deconstruction as Repair co-authored with Josh Armstrong will be published in Performance Research Journal 2021. Her film le Pain was an official selection at international film festivals, and won the Audience Choice award at East End Film Festival in London. Murman is the Programmer for Outgaze Film Festival: a virtual look at embodiment, inclusivity and resilience. She is the Artistic Director of FLOCK an international constellation of distinct individuals invested in collaboration, multiculturalism, queer expression, and pushing their own boundaries, and she collaborates with The International Laboratory of Performance Research AlmaKalma on live art projects and performance research. This year she is in residency at The Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans as part of their 2020/21 Commissioning Initiative with a grant from South Arts, and is a member of re:FRAME - a collective of movement research artists dedicated to exploring alternative systems for artistic sustainability. She is currently in development on her first feature film ways of forgetting.