Miguel Gutierrez (choreographer)

Miguel Gutierrez is an American dance and music artist born in 1971. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, he spent the early part of his career performing in San Francisco as a member of the Joe Goode Performance Group. He makes solo works and also works with collaborators as 'Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People'. His work tends towards the emotional and concerns itself with the phenomenon of existence. His fascinations lie with the body's ability to move between the mundane and the transcendent. His research also focuses on how the presence of the audience creates a space of attention and extraordinary perception.

His work has been presented at the Centre National du Danse, Centre Pompidou and Festival D'Automne in Paris, France, the Whitney Biennial in 2014, the Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, MIX: The NY Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, Diverseworks in Houston, TX, the Flynn Center in Burlington, VT, and internationally in festivals such as ImPuls Tanz in Vienna, Springdance Festival in Utrecht and Touch:2005 in Archangel, Russia.

Gutierrez received a 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

May 2016 the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation named Gutierrez a recipient of the Performing Artist Award, a grant "to empower, invest in and celebrate artists.... intended as deepened investments in the artists’ personal and professional development and future work."

Artist statement: "I make performances that are about things and are things themselves. The things they are about are big: How to live in the world, how to love, how to feel about being yourself. Probably the biggest question I make about art is: Why are we alive, I am a dancer. I write poems. I make songs and music with my voice and rudimentary knowledge of instruments. I think that we are all powerful people"

DEEP AEROBICS is a workout class in costumes playing on the themes of mortality, political protest, oppression, resistance and hope. It is over an hour of communal/political/conceptual/imaginational workout experience in public. It combines vigorous bouncing of one’s anatomical/spiritual/energetic molecules with the existential absurdity that is living in a world/country/economic system of injustice, war-mongering, and cultural ineptitude.

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Wikipedia