Gender in Performance: a KIKI with April Sellers Dance Collective
Coffee & Conversation 2024
Sunday, July 28th @10:30 am Björklunden 7590 Boynton Ln, Baileys Harbor, WI 54202
April Sellers Dance Collective will guide a community reflection and dialogue centering on the evolutions of gender in dance and performance. Coffee & Conversation welcomes artists, allies, advocates and all!
April Sellers is a choreographer with a desire to lift and celebrate ignored streams in society. She founded the April Sellers Dance Collective in 2002 to use dance to create new, more equitable futures, especially for the queer community. Using pop culture, politics, and queer histories, she infuses life’s extreme moments and human stories with dance craft, controlled bedlam and superb comedic chops. In 2021 she received the National Dance Project Production Grant for her most recent work, Rumble Strips. In 2017 she received the award “Artist of the Year” by City Pages for her performance, Animal Corridor. Her works have been commissioned by The Right Here Showcase, Candy Box Festival, Intermedia Arts, Southern Theater Hennepin Theater Trust and Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis and Dancing Queerly in Boston. Her artistic work has been supported with fellowships/grants from National Endowment for the Arts, MN State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Ohio Partners for the Arts and McKnight. She received a Sage Award for Outstanding Performance for “House of Big Love”, created and performed with collaborator Judith Howard, site specific at a St Paul residence. Over the past decade, Sellers’ work has been recognized by invitations to several well-known artist residencies, including the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Santa Cruz CA), Maggie Allesee Center for Choreography (Tallahassee FL) Tofte Lake Center (Ely MN) Centrum (Port Townsend WA) South Porch (Summerville SC) and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Thesis Residency, where she received her MFA in Dance.
The presentation of April Sellers Dance Collective was made possible by the NewEngland Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, with lead funding from theDoris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Photo (April Sellers)- Jennifer Glaws Header Design- Charlie Stephens, Photo- Allison Evans at Wild Nest Photography