“MGM Grand is coolness incarnate.” ~ New York Times

NUT is structured like a nut: a fruit with a skin, meat, and a seed. NUT speaks to our relationship with dance, as practice and as a discipline. NUT is MGM’s first dance created during the winter months. It questions the aesthetics of produced dance, and how it is expected to affect an audience and a venue. NUT takes cues from diverse performance cultures and historical influences such as Motown, elements of the mid-90’s NYC dance improvisation scene and Tommy DeFrantz’s dance class for undergraduates at MIT.

MGM Grand (Modern Garage Movement), an (un)disciplined art dance group, started as a threesome in a one-car garage in CA. Since 2005, MGM has taken themselves on the road, transforming spaces into arenas for audience-mobilizing dances: garages, galleries, alleyways, schools, movie theaters, streams and valleys. NUT began in Cambridge at MIT, premiered at The Kitchen, was recently performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) and will travel up the West Coast Aug/Sept 2011.

MGM is Biba Bell, Jmy Leary and Piage Martin, with R McNeill.

Previous works include Oneness: Making It With Love (2010), Easy Royce (2010), Royce (2009), Dajointe (2009), Tonight (2009), New Gree (2008), THIS DANCE IS CALLED GREE, IT IS FROM BEDSTUY. (2007) and Maynard (2005).

MGM has performed at numerous places, including American Dance Festival, Durham, NC; Artissima, Turin, Italy; Bohemian National Home, Detroit, MI; Callicoon Fine Arts, Callicoon, NY; Capital Theater,

Olympia WA; Creative Time OceanFront Pavilion at Miami Art Basel, Miami, FL; Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA; Henry Miller Library, Big Sur, CA; Jack Hanley Gallery, NY, NY; MacArthur b Arthur, Oakland, CA; Milk & Honey, Sebastopol, CA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Mission Creek Music Festival, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Jurassic Technology, LA, CA; Pace Wildenstein Gallery, NY, NY; Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR; Pleasure Pad, San Francisco, CA; Shane’s llama barn, Portland, OR; Subterranean Arthouse, Berkeley, CA; The Kitchen, NY, NY; and Twin Peaks Orchard, Lincoln, CA.

For more information, visit www.moderngaragemovement.com.
moderngaragemovement@gmail.com