Vermont Dance Alliance Residency
Spring 2025
The Vermont Dance Alliance Residency Program was founded to address the issue of talent flight from Vermont by creating new career pathways for dance artists within the state. The program serves as both an artistic incubator and a launching pad for new work. Each year, through a free and open application process, one Vermont choreographer is selected by an independent panel to receive 6 months of pro-bono studio space, a stipend, photography, and videography. Following the residency period, VDA produces a statewide tour of the artist's new work. The program is intended to have a beneficial ripple effect within Vermont's artistic ecosystem, by (1) creating paid work for the resident artist, ensemble dancers, collaborative artists, and technical production staff; (2) cultivating new partnerships within Vermont's performing arts sector; and (3) giving Vermont communities across the state access to high-quality dance and the opportunity to engage in the creative process via free community workshops.
Devising Lab
Choreography & Cardboard
with Vermont Dance Alliance Resident Artist Michael Bodel
Saturday 4/26 10 am - 11:30 am Chase Studio
*FREE
Dance artist Michael Bodel's work integrates objects and materials as central choreographic elements and inspiration. His new work, The Institute for Folding, unpeels layers of human knowledge through dance, text and a stack of 30 sheets of cardboard. This "devising lab" is part of a regional series of workshops where participants explore Bodel's approach to creating dance with objects and also contribute ideas and choreography to this new dance project.
This workshop is free and open to all levels. You must be at least 18 years old to participate. Prior experience with contemporary dance or movement theater is helpful but not required. Admittance is on a first-come-first-serve basis with a limited amount of slots available.
Please contact us with any accessibility questions or if you can no longer attend.
***This workshop is offered free of charge, but registration is required
Michael Bodel
Michael makes interdisciplinary dance works. Many integrate objects, place and sensorial stuff. His process involves wide-ranging research and both serious and silly play. And collaborators vary from project to project. Michael’s past works have included dances choreographed to oral histories of immigration, a pageant set in an apple orchard, and a dance iteration of Foucault’s Corps Utopique. Prior to The Institute for Folding, he created a dance project centered on grain—how it is sown, gathered, cared, hoarded and lost.
He is honored to sit (and move) on the board of advisors of The Field Center in Rockingham, VT, and has served on the board of the Society of Dance History Scholars (now Dance Studies Association). He fancies writing about historical pageantry and embodied cognition, and works daily as the Director of External Affairs at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth. Michael lives with his family in the fields of Putney, VT.
Photo by Swoyer Photography