TV comedian helped inspire award-winning dancer
Michelle Ellsworth, associate professor of dance, has been awarded a 2015 Doris Duke Impact Award. Ellsworth will receive an $80,000 grant with the award, to support her “radical experimentation” in unconventional displays of dance. Here, she appears in Clytigation: State of Exception. Photo by Satchel Spencer.
You have to thank Carol Burnett for Michelle Ellsworth’s art. At least in part.
, associate professor of dance at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been captivated by dance since she was 7, when she first saw the Ernest Flat Dancers on The Carol Burnett Show.
In between the show’s segments, jazz-dance sequences functioned as segues. “I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. That’s what I want to do for a living.’”
Now her performances both include and transcend dance, and her success has been routinely recognized. Just this month, she won a 2015 . The award includes an $80,000 grant aimed to support Ellsworth’s work.
Ellsworth is one of 20 artists nationwide to gain this recognition from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which aims to “invest in and celebrate artists” by offering flexible multi-year funding designed to help overcome funding challenges “both unique to the performing arts and to each grantee.”
The Doris Duke program supports individual artists in contemporary dance, theatre, jazz and related interdisciplinary work. Ellworth is one of only six dancers to win the Impact Award this year.
Ellsworth was informed someone had nominated her for the award some time ago, but, “I thought my chances were very slim, and I tried to forgot about it.”
“I’m profoundly surprised and pleased.”
An image from Clytigation: State of Exception. Photo by Satchel Spencer.
She describes her work as using humor and technology to explore a range of challenging themes including gender, genetics, politics and ecology.
Her 2015 explores protocols for avoiding surveillance, interpersonal drama and death. Crafted as both a performance and an installation art piece, the work incorporates audience-run mechanical devices, like a coin-operated device that shares a short phrase of movement for 25 cents and an exercise bike that controls a video’s speed and direction.
She describes Clytigation and as post-9-11 pieces. “I’m looking at war and technology and their impact on bodies,” she said. In Clytigation, which premiered in Seattle this spring, Ellsworth draws upon Aeschylus’ Oresteiatrilogy, in which the Greek goddess Athena introduces a legal system to put Orestes on trial for killing his mother, Clytemnestra—hence name of the work, a fusion of “Clytemnestra” and “litigation.”
In the play, Clytemnestra has killed the king (and her husband), Agamemnon. “Because killing a king is a political act, she is identified as a terrorist in her community.”
In the Oresteia, Athena ends the period of vendetta-based justice and launches a system of litigation in its place. “In Clytigation, I’m looking at how certain legal protocols changed in the U.S. in the post-9-11 environment—specifically dealing with military commissions, surveillance and the use of drones,” Ellsworth says.
“I use an ancient text and modern technology to discuss how wars impact legal protocol. Central to the work is a demonstration of my interpersonal drone and my over-the-counter counter-terrorism protocols for avoiding surveillance and death.”
More generally, Ellsworth’s artistic work often focuses on solving problems and “how problem-solving works (and doesn’t work) in collaboration with new technology.” Additionally, she tends to focus on how “human interactions complicate situations.”
Ellsworth describes the Doris Duke Impact Award as “incredibly potent,”
“I can make whatever needs to be made without the pressure of a big public premiere,” she observes. “It liberates me to make work that no one else would fund or that sounds like deeply terrible ideas or ideas that don’t have a place in traditional performance venues.”
Since joining the -Boulder faculty, the Department of Theatre and Dance has fostered the development of her art, she says. “I feel profoundly grateful for my department and .”
Her department, she says, “has truly one of the most expansive definitions of dance in the entire country.”
Her work can include web-site development, and in some of her pieces “I’m barely dancing at all.” She adds that landing in a department that supports “my radical experimentation has been absolutely essential to my success as an artist.”
Earlier this year, Ellsworth and the Boulder County Arts Alliance won a $25,000 grant from the MAP Fund to support her work titled The Rehearsal Artist. And in 2011, she won a $50,000 USA Fellowship Grant, which is designed to put unrestricted grants “directly into the hands of America’s finest artists.”
Ellsworth is scheduled to perform Clytigation in the Black Box Theater in -Boulder’s in October. She is also scheduled to perform it at Brown University in October and at the Chocolate Factory Theater in New York in November.
Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations for the College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the College of Arts and Sciences Magazine.