IN-PROCESS: LOVE LETTERS—CAGE TO CUNNINGHAM

Site-Specific Dances, led by Michael Spencer Phillips and Dino Kiratzidis, is a new type of interdisciplinary performing arts collective of artists, choreographers, musicians and designers, that activates sites with performances featuring local community members. Our work is at the intersection of performance and place and, much like architecture, each project emerges from a direct engagement with a site. Set to original music by living composers, the performances live on as immersive video installations, shown with live musicians and/or live dance.Site-Specific Dances began its location-based work during the pandemic and launched in April 2023 with a series of sold out media-performances at the Paul Taylor Dance Studios in New York City . More recent projects include site-specific performances engaging with Frederic Church’s Olana landscape in 2023, a performance in the summer of 2024 at the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center at Pocantico, and most recently, a collaboration with MASS Design Group’s Fringe Cities Design Lab to activate a decommissioned water cistern in Poughkeepsie, as part of their broader urban initiative. 

S-SD’s performance works are inspired by the theatricality inherent in the designed environment as well as the natural world, the growing awareness of pressing environmental issues, the desire to push the limits of interdisciplinary performance, and the belief that performance, when liberated from the confines of the conventional stage, can affect positive change in communities and places. S-SD’s projects hope to foster a diverse and ever-expanding network of interdisciplinary collaborators around the world. Site-Specific Dances is a registered 501(c)(3).

https://www.sitespecificdances.com

Photo: Aydin Arjomand

Michael Spencer Phillips is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and master teacher based in New York City. After 20+ years as a professional dancer in New York with modern dance luminaries Merce Cunningham, Pascal Rioult, Robert Battle, Bill T. Jones, and Jennifer Muller; and having performed in over 25 countries around the world, Phillips co-founded Site-Specific Dances along with his architect husband Dino Kiratziids, as an interdisciplinary performance collective that merges dance, music, and video to create performances as well as immersive media installations. Drawing inspiration from pioneers of site-specific modern dance such as Trisha Brown, Anne Halprin and Pina Bausch, Phillips expands notions of site-specificity to address not only sites but also the social and political entanglements presented in particular locations.  

Phillips has created commissioned works for Carnegie Hall, Universal Records, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, UC Berkeley, PLX Festival in Sweden, Ariel Rivka Dance, The Silesian Dance Festival, LangLab, The Open Look Festival, Notre Dame, University of Michigan, Interlochen, the Ailey School, Lehigh University, and Traverse City Dance Project. Phillips and Site-Specific Dances have received support from Tauck Ritzau Innovative Philanthropy, ArtBridge, Stonewall Community Foundation, ArtsEverywhere Canada, Musagetes Foundation, The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The Bloody Sunday Trust, The Museum of Free Derry, and The Swedish Arts Council. 

Teaching dance is one of the core elements of Phillips’ dance practice and has become increasingly important in his community dance projects, including MOVEMENT BRIDGE. Phillips has over 25 years of teaching and education experience and has taught masterclasses and workshops at many of the world’s leading universities, conservatories, and training programs. He has developed dance programming for the New York City Public School System.  He has led movement workshops for non-dancers in underserved and underrepresented areas including prisons and juvenile detention institutions.  In 2021, he developed ‘Dance Landscapes’ as the teaching arm of Site-Specific Dances. The program brings his unique movement classes and media works to K-12 institutions - introducing students to the connectivity of the language of modern dance to environmental issues. Phillips draws on the background in the community engagement workshops that form the backbone to many of his projects. 

Phillips holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Michigan and was honored with their alumni  “Emerging Artist” Award. He received further training from The Merce Cunningham School, The Martha Graham School, and The Paul Taylor School. He has also been a panelist for the New York State Council for the Arts, The Joyce Theater, American Dance Festival, the NYC Department of Education, and has done media appearances and press for CBS News,  the BBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post; always being interviewed for his expertise on the topic of the state of dance and the arts in the United States and abroad.

Phillips utilizes his most comfortable language - movement - as a battle hymn for environmental and social change, while pushing the limits of what interdisciplinary performance can be, and how we might present it through media in new contexts.

Photo: Emma Kazaryan

Based in New York City, Dino Kiratzidis is an Associate at the New York-based architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. He is also one of the two Artistic Directors of Site-Specific Dances, a non-profit media/performance company exploring projects at the intersection of performance and place, and founded in 2022 with choreographer Michael Spencer Phillips. At DS+R, he has focused on concept and schematic development for projects in the performing arts, museums, institutional buildings and memorials. His work with Site-Specific Dances develops a discursive engagement with sites through analysis, drawings, video, and digital animations. His work makes sense of sites as they are, and speculates on their ‘theatrical potentials’. He also leads the design of S-SD’s stage performances and media installations. He studied at Yale School of Architecture, receiving a Master of Architecture degree. He has been an invited reviewer at Yale University, Pratt Institute and The University of Pennsylvania, and taught design studios at UPenn and Yale (with Joel Sanders and Tom Wiscombe, respectively). Prior to working at DS+R, Dino was a designer at CoopHimmelb(l)au in Vienna and sharpCITY in Johannesburg. He was born in 1984 in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was first exposed to the ethos of community-based design during his time at 26’10 South, a research-based design studio in Johannesburg. As a participant in the Johannesburg Drill Hall edition of Cascoland, a collaborative project that ‘re-activated’ a neglected part of the inner city of Johannesburg, he saw first-hand how thoughtful site activations can catalyze positive changes in the urban environment. His work spans buildings, landscapes, memorials, exhibitions, activations and performances. His current independent research explores productive overlaps between performance and architecture/urban design.

Photo: Victor Jeffrys

A "daring pianist" praised for his "adventurousness and muscular skill" (The New York Times), Grammy-nominated artist Adam Tendler has been called "the hottest pianist on the American contemporary classical scene" (Minneapolis Star Tribune), “relentlessly adventurous” (Washington Post), a "remarkable and insightful musician" (LA Times), an "intrepid... maverick pianist" (The New Yorker), and "one of contemporary classical music's most intentional and daring pianists" (Seven Days). A pioneer of DIY culture in classical music, at age 23 Tendler performed solo recitals in all fifty states as part of a grassroots tour called America 88x50, the subject of his memoir, 88x50. He has since become one of classical music's most recognized and celebrated artists, receiving Lincoln Center's Emerging Artist Award, the Yvar Mikhashoff Prize, and appearing as soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, LA Phil, Sydney Symphony, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, NJ Symphony, Vermont Symphony Orchestra, as well as on the main-stages of Carnegie Hall, the Barbican Centre, Sydney Opera House, BAM, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Milan Fashion Week, and other leading series and stages worldwide. As a recording artist, he is featured on Wild Up's Grammy-nominated third volume of Julius Eastman's music, and has also released  albums of music by Franz Liszt, Robert Palmer, and of his own original work. He recently commissioned and recorded 16 new pieces using the entire inheritance left to him by his father after his unexpected death, including works by Laurie Anderson, Nico Muhly, Dev Hynes and Missy Mazzoli, as part of a program called Inheritances, a New York Times Critic Pick, which said of the album, "You will be moved, profoundly and intensely," and described the project as "a display of contemporary compositional force... a true show...emotionally involving...with a sense of true dramatic stakes." As Green-wood Cemetery's Artist-In-Residence, Tendler a site-specific installation, Exit Strategy, open through summer 2024. Adam Tendler is a Yamaha Artist and serves on the piano faculty of NYU.

Phong Tran is a Brooklyn-based composer and visual artist primarily working in digital and electronic mediums. His work revolves around emotional experience in digital and nonphysical spaces. Phong’s solo work has been released through New Amsterdam Records, people | places | records, and slashsound. Collaborative works of his have been released by Carrier Records, Bright Shiny Things, Gold Bolus Records, and Records to Burn. He’s been featured at the Savannah Music Festival, Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival (Public Records, Brooklyn, NY), Loud Weekend (MassMoCA), and Momentous Festival (The Momentary). He has also performed with Sō Percussion, Miss Grit, and Darian Donovan Thomas.

Phong’s visual work revolves around imagined 3D worlds and spaces. Notable commissioned work of his include a series of Graphic Scores commissioned by A24 and Son Lux as part of a book of piano arrangements for the film Everything, Everywhere, All At Once; a custom 3D image rendering as a companion to FINAL SKIN by BAKUDI SCREAM, and graphic designs for Bang on a Can and So Percussion.

Phong’s most recent work, The World We Left Behind, is a ballet made in collaboration with Troy Schumacher (NYC Ballet) and BalletCollective. The work was inspired by a newly commissioned tabletop role-playing game by Samantha Leigh in which two players collaboratively explore an abandoned world and uncover shared mysteries and secrets. The ballet premiered October 30th, 2023 and was released through CMNTX Records on November 1st, 2024.

His 2nd album, The Computer Room, was released on November 19, 2021 through New Amsterdam Records. The album is a “thank you” to the virtual worlds, video games, message boards, and online communities of people he grew up with in the early 2000s. Phong’s most recent work, The World We Left Behind, is a ballet made in collaboration with Troy Schumacher (NYC Ballet) and BalletCollective. The work was inspired by a newly commissioned tabletop role-playing game by Samantha Leigh in which two players collaboratively explore an abandoned world and uncover shared mysteries and secrets.

Photo: Alex SK Brown

Matthew Ricketts (b. 1986, British Columbia) is a Canadian composer based in New York City. His music moves from extremes of presence and absence, from clamor to quietude, at once reticent and flamboyant. Matthew’s music has been called “lyrical, contrapuntal, rhythmically complex and highly nuanced” (The American Academy of Arts and Letters) and is noted for his “effervescent and at times prickly sounds,” “hypnotically churning exploration of melody” (ICareIfYouListen) as well as its “tart harmonies and perky sputterings” (The New York Times). He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow.

His works have been performed internationally by JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Flux Quartet, the Fromm Players, Quatuor Bozzini, the Chiara String Quartet; vocalists Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Tony Arnold, Sharon Harms, Lauren Worsham, Karim Sulayman and Ekmeles; Collage New Music, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, Ensemble Paramirabo, Argento and Talea Ensemble; soloists Jean-Willy Kunz, Nathaniel LaNasa, Sara Laimon and Julia Den Boer; and orchestras including the Aspen Philharmonic (Robert Spano, cond.), Esprit Orchestra (Alex Pauk, cond.), the Minnesota Orchestra (Osmo Vänskä, cond.), the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (Kent Nagano, cond.), the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg. Matthew was Composer-Collaborator-In-Residence at East Carolina University from 2016-2018.

In 2018 Ricketts’ multilingual opera Chaakapesh: The Trickster’s Quest (written with renowned Cree playwright Tomson Highway) opened the Montreal Symphony’s 84th season to great critical acclaim and went on to tour Indigenous communities throughout Québec. Recent and upcoming performances include the US premiere of Unruly Sun, written with Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell for Grammy Award-winning Karim Sulayman (Bay Chamber Concerts, Maine), an operatic adaptation of The Cremation of Sam McGee with Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist/lyricist Royce Vavrek (Vancouver Opera) and a new nativity oratorio for contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (in collaboration with celebrated Québecois author Alain Farah). Other recent premieres include works for Dominik Belavy (Brooklyn Art Song Society), Daniel McGrew (The Morgan Library) and Brett Polegato (Canadian Art Song Project through Calgary Opera, October 2024).

Matthew is the recipient of fellowships from the Fromm Foundation (2024) and NYSCA (2024), Bogliasco Foundation (2023), Millay Arts (2022), Civitella Ranieri (2021), The American Academy of Arts and Letters (2020), MacDowell (2022; 2019), the Tanglewood Music Center (2018 Elliott Carter Memorial Fellowship) and the Aspen Music Festival (2017), in addition to the 2016 Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Prize, the 2016 Jacob Druckman Prize (Aspen Music Festival), the 2016 Mivos/Kanter Prize, the 2015 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award, a 2013 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and eight prizes in the SOCAN Foundation’s Awards for Young Composers.

Active as a writer as well as a composer, Matthew has published articles, reviews, poetry and libretti, and has worked closely with authors and poets Lauren J. Rogener, Paul Legault, Mark Campbell, Mark Wunderlich, Royce Vavrek, Klara du Plessis and Tomson Highway on multiple collaborative projects. Other collaborative endeavors include scoring the feature-length film Glob Lessons (Tribeca Film Festival premiere, 2021) and recent projects with dancer-choreographers Brendan Drake and Jennifer Nichols.

Matthew’s principal mentors include Brian Cherney, John Rea and Chris Paul Harman at McGill University, and George Lewis and Fred Lerdahl at Columbia University, where he also served as a Core Lecturer from 2017-2020. Also active as a performing musician, Matthew sings with Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, works as a vocal accompanist and occasionally performs cabaret at venues around New York City.

Photo: Michael Kuhn