Contemporary Practice
Faculty: Caden Manson
Contemporary Practice focuses on Contemporary Performance artists and thinkers and looks at how we situate our practice in the field. During the first semester, students investigate current and emerging practices in Performing Care, Contemporary Choreography, Speculative Theater, Immersive Theatre, Co-Presence, Performance Cabaret, Post-Digital Strategies, Socially Engaged Art, and Mixed Reality Performance. During the second semester, students create individual artist statements, bios, resumes, and websites; develop pitches for new work; and learn how to engage with funders, artistic directors, and presenters.
Below are examples of the bios, websites, artists statements, resumes, and cvs the students developed during the component.
Maura Beth Hrynczyszyn
Maura Beth Hrynczyszyn, Philadelphia’s baby, (aka as Maura Beth is Hagfish and the Four Hearts) lives and works in the city of Philadelphia with some NYC stints. They make music, perform in musicals, make performance art and other what not. They are always wondering about and making work that navigates how embracing being an animal can make you a better person, as well as how to live fully in the presence of death and despair (which are the samething). They are a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, a music maker and lyricist, and a musical theater performer. They continue to make and sing goofy rock and funky folk and everything else. Come jam !
Kyrie Ellison
Kyrie Ellison is a performance maker based in New York City. Her work utilizes the choreographic, through stage combat and movement, to build femme communal spaces & speculative narratives to confront oppressive forms. She’s curious about the stories we tell each other to “just get through it” and how they relate to the fairy tales and tropes made popular by writers. Past performances include, but are not limited to Athena by Gracie Gardner, Solution Amniotic, I’d Be All Alone, The Trojan Women, The Snow Queen, Spring Awakening & Cabaret. Currently, she’s workshopping a generated piece about coping mechanisms at Sarah Lawrence College where she’s earning her M.F.A. www.ellisonarts.com
Claire Bronchick
Claire Bronchick is a Los Angeles-born and Richmond, Virginia-based theatre artist. She situates her work between the materiality of the human body and its environment, tackling confrontations with the sublime using the tools of the body and public space. They studied at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France and obtained their BA in Theatre and French at Sarah Lawrence College in May 2020. Claire has performed at the Hollywood Fringe Festival and recently played Philoclea in Head over Heels, in addition to puppet designing for a new play Lil’ Amanda Show and costume/puppet/set designing for her own play There’s a Moon in The Sky (Called The Moon), a girl’s science-fiction journey to space and the consequences of the exhausting pursuit of knowledge. Website
Eleanor Lougee-Heimer
Eleanor Lougee-Heimer (she/they) is a New York City based theater artist. Using the choreographic, their work examines loss and rebirth through a digital platform; confronting the universality of failure with rebellious joy and unfinished structure. Her most recent collaboration, thewaves-or-untitled , is a radical deconstruction of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves , highlighting fascinations with internet culture. Eleanor is currently working on Vigil, a generated piece that centers around five strangers mourning the death of a traffic cone. Eleanor is an alum of Sarah Lawrence College, The Moscow Art Theatre School, and The Prague Film School.
Hallie Riddick
Hallie Riddick is a theater artist and songwriter from Louisville, KY based in New York. Hallie’s work uses song, ritual, movement, text, and magic to find the putrid in the pretty and release femmehood from the restraints of romanticism. In response to her childhood spent in Louisville, Kentucky, her work often revolves around the sounds of Bluegrass and folk and lives in rural communities in the American South. Hallie is currently workshopping Flush, an original play with music that centers on the lives of four girls who escape to the woods to rid themselves of grief through spells and prayer. She is also working on a new play, Krissy Anne, that follows a mother and daughter facing the evils of an abusive boyfriend and the haunting song spells of a troupe of troll girls. Hallie is an alum of Sarah Lawrence College, The Moscow Art Theatre School, and The National Theater Institute’s Advanced Directing Program. www.hallieriddick.com
Amelia Bethel
Amelia Bethel is multitudes. Her work confronts the performance of identity, with a focus on sexuality and the mixed-race Latinx experience. Her original work has been presented at the San Francisco Olympians Festival, Chicago Women’s Funny Fest, and elsewhere across the country. She can be heard as Marisol on the award-winning podcast Unwell from HartLife Studios, and is currently developing a two-woman show based on the embodiment of Latina/x stereotypes. She is an MFA candidate in Theatre at Sarah Lawrence College.