About the Performance
Super Nothing is a new dance performance by artist and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez. It explores his personal archive of performance to see how the past can provide a blueprint for a more rigorous honesty in the present. The work features a diverse ensemble of performers from New York and Los Angeles—Gutierrez’s two artistic and professional home—and asks how the dynamics of an art-making process reflect or deny the dynamics of life outside the studio. Can choreography be a reflection of the desires, insecurities, and personal investments of those present during its creation?
When describing Super Nothing, Gutierrez often references author, theorist, and educator bell hooks’s seminal 1989 essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” There she writes: “Moving, we confront the reality of choice and location.” Drawing from this notion, Gutierrez thinks about movement both in terms of dance and in the geographic sense of the word. In Super Nothing, ideas of place/home, time, history, and the possibilities and failings of “community” are scrutinized in pursuit of greater understanding of ourselves in the present.
Support
Super Nothing is co-commissioned by New York Live Arts, CAP UCLA, and MCA Chicago with support from the National Performance Network. Super Nothing is commissioned, produced, and presented by New York Live Arts as part of the Randjelović / Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist Program, with lead support from the Mellon Foundation.
Access Information
Audio description and English CART captioning are available for the performance on Saturday, March 29. To request additional accessibility services, please contact us via email at [email protected] or call 312-397-4076.
About the Artist
Miguel Gutierrez is a multidisciplinary dance artist and Feldenkrais Method practitioner living between Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY, and Tovaangar/Los Angeles. His work creates empathetic, irreverent, and reflective spaces for himself and other QTPOC folx and centers attention as a means to unravel normative belief systems. Recent work includes I as another, which looks at the virtual architecture of memory, and sueño, a bilingual music project of melancholy songs. He is an Associate Professor of Choreography at UCLA in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where he also serves as the Vice-Chair of the MFA program in Choreographic Inquiry. Gutierrez is the 2023–2024 New York Live Arts Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA). The culmination of this residency is the premiere of Super Nothing, a quartet that works with the archive to identify new possibilities for coming together.
Funding
Lead support for the 2024–25 season of MCA Performance is provided by Elizabeth A. Liebman.
Generous support is provided by Ginger Farley and Bob Shapiro, Martha Struthers Farley and Donald C. Farley, Jr. Family Foundation, N.A., Trustee; Anne L. Kaplan; and Carol Prins and John Hart/The Jessica Fund.
The MCA is a proud member of the Museums in the Park and receives major support from the Chicago Park District.