Residency Periods

• June 2-8
• June 16-22
• June 30-July 6

“I thought it would be difficult to hold performative attention without having human witnesses, but the more I tended to the land, the more I allowed myself to sense and be sensed by the land, the more rewarding and transformative this journey became. The simplest way I can describe it is that I left not wanting to dance the same way, or for the same reasons again. I want to dance for the land, no matter where I am. I want land acknowledgement to guide and shift, complicate and reverberate through the dance. I want it to be the dance.”

David Guzman, 2021 artist-in-residence

Another Audience is a mutable performance project created and facilitated by Nicole Daunic. The program exists as a creative residency space, a moveable collective research platform, a deep spacetime portal and whatever else it needs to become. It is offered as a container to support, engage and connect artists whose performance research and practice takes place within an intra-active, multi-species, multi-agential arena animated by expanded, post-anthropocentric notions of audience and performance. Through this work, another audience seeks to engage and uplift human/nonhuman/inhuman/more-than-human risky collaborations, ambiguous communions, and synergistic publics.

Read more about our history and creative framework

Another Audience was initiated in 2021 at a time when many performing arts venues were shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the opportunity for artists to share their work with traditional audiences was indeterminably deferred. New questions surfaced (or surfaced differently) around already mercurial concepts such as “audience” and “presence” during this time when gathering together as we previously knew it was simply not possible. In this sense, Another Audience’s proposal to consider performance within a multi-species, multi-agential arena beyond anthropocentric stages was part of a multitude of experimentations that emerged in response to the loss of the audience during this time[1]. Since then, Another Audience has continued each year to support the development of creative research by artists, collaborators and collectives working at the forefront of this expanded field.

We honor and recognize indigenous communities around the world who have long lived in accordance with what Ramámuri ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón calls “kincentric ecologies” grounded in a worldview in which “humans are not more important to the natural world than any other form of life (10)”. Aboriginal, Māori, and the Tvlwv Pvlvcekolv American Indian community among many others have developed a rich living history of rituals and dances over centuries that honor their kinships with the more-than-human. Therefore, in this framework, we begin from a place that acknowledges, engages and learns from indigenous knowledge, practices and world views rooted in kincentric ecologies. 

Lastly, through this effort to engage post-anthropocentric stages, this project emphasizes that rather than reinforcing a binary between the human and the non-human or generalizing the “human” (a concept many have been excluded from throughout history) [5] our intention is to explore how the creative engagement of Another Audience might open and expand our capacity as artists to attune ourselves across a multiplicity of relationships, creative milieus, desires, values and ways of being that are not for us and to practice other ways of being human or more-than-human.

References

[1] Danspace Platform 2021: The Dream of the Audience (Part I) May 15-June 18, 2021, Danspace Project, NYC https://danspaceproject.org/calendar/platform-2021-schedule/; Dancespace Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II) April 23-June 11, 2022, Danspace Project, NYC https://danspaceproject.org/calendar/platform-2022/; Knight, Autumn. “Autumn Knight at The Kitchen” The Kitchen OnScreen, July 24, July 31 and August 7, 2021 https://onscreen.thekitchen.org/autumn-knight; Kosoko, Jaamil Olawale. “Chameleon (The Living Installments)” EMPAC, April 22, 2020 https://empac.rpi.edu/events/2020/chameleon-living-installments, to name only a few. In addition there were countless Instagram Live and outdoor dance classes.

[2] Myers, Natasha. How to Grow Liveable Worlds, 2021.

[3] Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. , 2019.

[4] See for example, Koons, R. A. (2019). Becoming Avian in the Anthropocene: Performing the Feather Dance and the Owl Dance at Pvlvcekolv. Humanimalia, 10(2), 95–127. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9503; Magowan, Fiona, and Karl Neuenfeldt, eds. Landscapes of Indigenous performance: music, song and dance of the Torres Strait and Arnhem Land.Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005.; Clément, Vincent. “Dancing bodies and Indigenous ontology: what does the haka reveal about the Māori relationship with the Earth?.” Transactions of the institute of British geographers 42.2 (2017): 317-328.; Baquedano-López, Patricia, and Nate Gong. “Indigenous Mobilities in Diaspora. Literacies of Spatial Tense.” Literacies in the Age of Mobility. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2022. 25-49.; Leon, Alannah Young, and Denise Nadeau. “Embodying Indigenous Resurgence.” Sharing Breath: Embodied Learning and Decolonization (2018): 55-82.; Sable, Trudy. “preserving the whole: principles of sustainability in mi’kmaw forms of communication.” Unlearning the Language of Conquest. University of Texas Press, 2021. 166-179.

[5] Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. , 2014.

Applicants are invited to consider the following prompts for engagement with Another Audience:

• We invite artists working in the field of dance to consider the idea of another or expanded audience with which to share performance and embodied practice. What might it mean to extract performance from its container, seen here not only as the black box of the theater but anthropocentric economies of attention that give it shape? What might it mean, instead, to explore performance in a multi-species arena by choosing to engage a multitude of more-than-human modes of perception, values and desires assembled and co-mingling together on this ancestral Abenaki land? 

• What tensions and potentials arise through this proposal and how might our own relationships to these things shift when we begin to fathom an audience beyond the human gaze that is sentient, alive and performative with, as anthropologist Natasha Myers suggests, “their own desires for forms of life that are not for us” [2]?

• If, within the paradigm of surveillance capitalism outlined by Shoshana Zuboff [3], the value of our attention has been made apparent through the monetization and capture of our movements online, then what are the critical impacts of shifting our attention in this way? What happens when we expand our attention to encompass entanglements and vital ecological economies which are often beyond direct perceptibility? What if instead of a commodity, we considered attention a gift?

Residency Structure and Details:

Another Audience is proposed as a barter. In this exchange, Black Hole Hollow offers artists lodging for 6 nights, use of our barn space [link], access to 28 acres of field and forest and our growing resource library. In return, artists give a performance to the land, which is archived as a performance essence [link].

Food and Transportation:

Awardees are responsible for their own food and transportation. 

Collaborators:

We can accommodate up to two collaborators within the shared space of the apothecary. If some are willing to camp (with their own camping gear) you can accommodate more collaborators.

Families:

In support artists who are parents, we welcome families of up to four members.

Location:

We are located in southwestern Vermont, one mile from the NY border. The simplest way to get here is by car. This will also enable you to independently take care of your own groceries. The closest train station is Albany-Rensselaer Train Station. Bolt Bus also stops at the trains station. Lyft and Uber operate from the train station. It is typically around $60 to get here from Albany. It is also possible to rent a car from at the station.

Accessibility:

We strive to make our application process as accessible as possible. If you require accommodations (alternative formats, assistance, etc.), please contact us [link]. Please see the space page for accessibility details about the land.  

Application Process:

• Online Application Form
• Required Materials:
  • CV 
  • Bio
• Deadline: March 17, 2025 by 11:59 PM
• Application Fee: No fee to apply

Eligibility:

• Open to artists working in the field of dance at any stage in their process.
• We encourage applications from artists from underrepresented backgrounds, including BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled, and low-income artists.

Questions?