The Yard Fall Residencies

This Fall, the Yard continues to support artists and impact the residents of Martha’s Vineyard!

How To Be a Visitor
Culture Mill, Creation/Development Residency
Nov. 3-10, 2024

How do we sit in the role of being a visitor, in new and sometimes unfamiliar spaces? How do we inhabit and accept the experience of not entirely understanding others, or being totally understood ourselves?  How To Be a Visitor examines how, in our bodies and through movement, we operate in the role of visitor. How we navigate trans-cultural codes to not only connect distant and unfamiliar audiences, but to also highlight natural and inherent gaps in understanding. Commissioned by the American Dance Festival (ADF), Culture Mill collaborates with artists across the globe remotely: Tommy Noonan (USA), Mia Habib (Israel/Norway), Jassem Hindi (Palestine/France), Frank Mugisha (Rwanda/Uganda), Edgar Kanyike (Uganda), Sebulime Elisha Davis (Uganda), Cortland Gilliam (USA), and Caitlyn Swett (USA) to create an expansive work that brings artists and audiences together simultaneously in performance. Through layers of choreography, sound, and poetry accumulated during concurrent solos, audiences across distances co-witness completely different experiences and contexts in the same moment. Culture Mill will be here for one week, developing aspects of this new piece that will feature artists from around the globe, joining virtually.

IN PROGRESS SHOWING - Saturday, Nov. 9 at 2 pm, Katherine Cornell Theater, Tisbury Town Hall. Feedback session to follow. RSVP required. Email yvonnemendez@dancetheyard.org.

Special thanks to Slough Farm for their support of our fall residencies.

Godfrey Muwulya - East African Dance & Drumming
Nov 3-15, 2024

Godfrey Muwulya returns to the Island with his explosive East African Dance and Drumming Program! Godfrey will visit the Island for a two week residency, teaching East African Dance to students across the island. The program has grown and now in 2024 includes 6 schools: MV Charter School, Chilmark School, Edgartown School, Oak Bluffs School, MV Montessori School and Tisbury School. Godfrey conducts individual sessions at each school with 4th & 5th graders mostly, although other grades have been known to join in! Each school learns a particular dance, and then everyone comes together to perform their dance on the big stage at a spectacular Showcase at the MV Performing Arts Center! 

This year’s Showcase is by invitation only and happens on November 15th from 10-11:30 am. For more information and for reservations, please contact Yvonne Mendez yvonnemendez@dancetheyard.org.