EmmaGrace Skove-Epes (she/they) is a Brooklyn-born and based movement, sound, and text-based artist, performer, and educator. Her performance work has lived at venues including the Center for Performance Research, the 92nd street Y, Nothing Space, Gibney, Movement Research at Judson Church, TheaterLab, Theater for the New City, Roulette Intermedium, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Chez Bushwick, Inc. New York Live Arts, AUNTS/Arts@Renaissance, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Riverside Park, Triskelion Arts, the School of Contemporary Dance and Thought (MA), and the Sable Project (VT). She has been a space grantee at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and has previously been in residence at Chez Bushwick Inc., Gowanus Arts, Gibney (Work Up), New York Live Arts (Fresh Tracks, with collaborator Jonathan González), the Sable Project (VT), Arts on Site (Kerhonkson, NY), and MOtiVE Brooklyn. As a performer, EmmaGrace currently dances with choreographer marion spencer and is an ongoing performing collaborator in the work of Edisa Weeks. They have previously been a collaborating performer in the works of choreographers Julie Mayo, RoseAnne Spradlin, Jill Sigman, Kathy Westwater, Mariangela Lopez, Jon Kinzel, Dianne McIntyre, Jodi Melnick, Peniel Guerrier, Jesse Phillips-Fein, Jonathan González, Mor Mendel, Nadia Tykulsker, Sondra Loring, Noemie LaFrance, Leslie Boyce, Allie Avital-Tsypin, Crighton Atkinson, Maria Simpson, and Aileen Passloff. EmmaGrace performed as a vocalist with the band SCHOOL and as a guest vocalist with Shenandoah and the Night. EmmaGrace teaches dance studies at Sarah Lawrence College, and has taught dance technique, improvisation, somatics, composition, and collaborative devising through the American Dance Festival, DanceWave, New York Live Arts, Movement Research, James Baldwin High School, Failspace, Third Root Community Health Center, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Stella Adler/NYU Tisch Drama Department, NYU Tisch Summer Dance Residency Festival, and Bard College. EmmaGrace is a practitioner of the MELT Method- a client led and centered bodywork modality focused on reducing chronic pain, healing from and preventing cyclical injuries through fascial techniques and increasing body literacy. She is currently a member of the Manna-hatta Fund administrative team, which supports the work of the American Indian Community House, and has previously organized with Creating New Futures, Artist Co-Creating Real Equity, Bodies For Bodies,The People’s Space, European Dissent, and Breaking White Silence. SLC, 2023-
Undergraduate Courses 2024-2025
Dance
Writing On, With, and Through Dance: A Dance Writing Seminar
Component—Fall
DNCE 5608
When we write about dance, movement arts, and performance practice, how can we address and unpack the politics and power dynamics inherently at play in authorship, spectatorship, participatory experience, and research? How might our individual intersectional subjectivities be avenues into engaging the act of meaning-making while witnessing, conversing with, and archiving dance and performance? In this seminar, we will study various historical and current relationships of writing to movement-based performance practice, tracing the legacy of dance criticism and its subsequent evolution as a point of departure. We will look at a myriad of forms of dance writing that exemplify different potentials for relationship between performer and audience member or witness, including but not be limited to: dance criticism, embedded criticism, autotheory, writing on advocacy and ethics within the dance field, transcribed interviews and conversations with dance and movement artists, and artists’ “process notes.” We will also look at texts that are not directly situated within dance studies but that emerge from various feminist and queer lineages in which theory, research, and critique have become modes that evoke a deepening of relationship between subjectivity, environment, and art-making. In addition to reading and discussing various forms of dance writing, students will develop their own writing practice in conversation with filmed footage of dance performances and rehearsals and live dance performances and rehearsals.
Faculty
Graduate Courses 2024-2025
MFA Dance
Writing On, With, and Through Dance
Component—Fall
5608
When we write about dance, movement arts, and performance practice, how can we address and unpack the politics and power dynamics inherently at play in authorship, spectatorship, participatory experience, and research? How might our individual intersectional subjectivities be avenues into engaging the act of meaning-making while witnessing, conversing with, and archiving dance and performance? In this seminar, we will study various historical and current relationships of writing to movement-based performance practice, tracing the legacy of dance criticism and its subsequent evolution as a point of departure. We will look at a myriad of forms of dance writing that exemplify different potentials for relationship between performer and audience member or witness, including but not be limited to: dance criticism, embedded criticism, autotheory, writing on advocacy and ethics within the dance field, transcribed interviews and conversations with dance and movement artists, and artists’ “process notes.” We will also look at texts that are not directly situated within dance studies but that emerge from various feminist and queer lineages in which theory, research, and critique have become modes that evoke a deepening of relationship between subjectivity, environment, and art-making. In addition to reading and discussing various forms of dance writing, students will develop their own writing practice in conversation with filmed footage of dance performances and rehearsals and live dance performances and rehearsals.