“MGM Grand is coolness incarnate.” ~ New York Times
NUT is structured like a nut: a fruit with a skin, meat, and a seed. NUT speaks to
our relationship with dance, as practice and as a discipline. NUT is MGM’s first dance
created during the winter months. It questions the aesthetics of produced dance, and
how it is expected to affect an audience and a venue. NUT takes cues from diverse
performance cultures and historical influences such as Motown, elements of the
mid-90’s NYC dance improvisation scene and Tommy DeFrantz's dance class for
undergraduates at MIT.
MGM Grand (Modern Garage Movement), an (un)disciplined art dance group, started
as a threesome in a one-car garage in CA. Since 2005, MGM has taken themselves
on the road, transforming spaces into arenas for audience-mobilizing dances: garages,
galleries, alleyways, schools, movie theaters, streams and valleys. NUT began in
Cambridge at MIT, premiered at The Kitchen, was recently performed at the Museum
of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) and will travel up the West Coast Aug/Sept
2011.
MGM is Biba Bell, Jmy Leary and Piage Martin, with R McNeill.
Previous works include Oneness: Making It With Love (2010), Easy Royce (2010), Royce (2009), Dajointe
(2009), Tonight (2009), New Gree (2008), THIS DANCE IS CALLED GREE, IT IS FROM BEDSTUY.
(2007) and Maynard (2005).
MGM has performed at numerous places, including American Dance Festival, Durham, NC; Artissima,
Turin, Italy; Bohemian National Home, Detroit, MI; Callicoon Fine Arts, Callicoon, NY; Capital Theater,
Olympia WA; Creative Time OceanFront Pavilion at Miami Art Basel, Miami, FL; Esalen Institute, Big Sur,
CA; Henry Miller Library, Big Sur, CA; Jack Hanley Gallery, NY, NY; MacArthur b Arthur, Oakland, CA;
Milk & Honey, Sebastopol, CA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Mission Creek
Music Festival, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Jurassic Technology, LA, CA; Pace Wildenstein Gallery, NY,
NY; Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR; Pleasure Pad, San Francisco, CA; Shane's llama barn,
Portland, OR; Subterranean Arthouse, Berkeley, CA; The Kitchen, NY, NY; and Twin Peaks Orchard,
Lincoln, CA.
For more information, visit www.moderngaragemovement.com.
moderngaragemovement@gmail.com