Congratulations to Paige Cunningham, Kristina Isabelle, Mark Jeffery, and Victor Alexander Ramirez!

Chicago Dancemakers Forum is pleased to announce its support for the creative work of these four dancemakers as they embark upon the 2012 Lab Artist Program, beginning this spring. The four Chicago-based recipients, Paige Cunningham, Kristina Isabelle, Mark Jeffery, and Victor Alexander Ramirez, were selected from a highly competitive pool of candidates through a rigorous application process. Each artist will receive a $15,000 award for research and the creation of a new work, plus process-oriented support to facilitate their creative development. Proposed projects include: 

Paige Cunningham is a choreographer, dancer, and teacher. For her CDF project, Cunningham will create, In Pursuit of Giselle, an examination of the ways in which Contemporary Ballet vernacular can fuse and blend with Voguing vocabulary.  Cunningham will explore the physicality and vocabulary of these forms as well as the socio-cultural commonalities of the practitioners of both forms who operate in sub-cultures but at the same time experience differences based on class, culture and identity. 

Kristina Isabelle is a dancer, choreographer, artistic director of Kristina Isabelle Dance Company, and director of HighJinks Productions.  Isabelle will spend her CDF year working on, The Floating City, a multi-media dance theater production exploring transitional places through the lens of magical realism.  Her process will include creating unique environments and landscapes with the use of dance and video.

Mark Jeffery is a performance and installation based artist who was a member of Goat Island Performance Group (1996-2009). As a CDF Lab Artist, Mark will create a choreographic performance-technology work with digital artist Judd Morrissey and a small group of male dancers. Memento Mori: Anatomical Theaters of Mixed Reality will blend the crudeness of early surgery with the prevailing 21^st century vision of a body enhanced by data, traceable by forensics, and augmented by computation and bio-technology. 

Victor Alexander Ramirez is a dancer and choreographer who mixes intensity and rigorous technique, born from training in Cuban dance academies, with theatrical interpretation.  Longing is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between Ramirez and artist/weaver Deborah Voloma integrating the conceptual, spatial, rhythmic, and sensual dynamics of weaving and dance.