A Brooklyn-born and based movement, sound, and text-based artist, performer, and educator, Skove-Epes's performance work has lived at venues including the Center for Performance Research, the 92nd Street Y, Nothing Space, Gibney, TheaterLab, Theater for the New City, Roulette Intermedium, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, New York Live Arts, AUNTS/Arts@Renaissance, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Riverside Park, Triskelion Arts, and the School of Contemporary Dance and Thought (MA). She is currently an artist in residence at MOtiVE Brooklyn and has previously been in residence at Chez Bushwick Inc., the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Gowanus Arts, Gibney (Work Up), New York Live Arts (Fresh Tracks, with collaborator Jonathan González), the Sable Project (VT), and Arts on Site (Kerhonkson, NY). As a performer, Skove-Epes currently works with choreographers Edisa Weeks and Julie Mayo and has previously been a collaborating performer in the works of choreographers 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, Maria Simpson, and Aileen Passloff—and has performed as a vocalist with the band SCHOOL. Skove-Epes currently teaches dance technique, improvisation, and dance composition at DanceWave and is a practitioner of the MELT Method, a self-treatment technique and form of bodywork. She has previously taught dance and somatics through the American Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, Movement Research, James Baldwin High School, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Stella Adler/NYU Tisch Drama Department, NYU Tisch Summer Dance Residency Festival and Bard College. Skove-Epes is a new member of Bodies For Bodies, a collective of queer and trans bodyworkers who offer sliding-scale and free-of-charge bodywork to queer and trans clients in Brooklyn, NY. They have organized with Creating New Futures, Artist Co-Creating Real Equity, European Dissent, Breaking White Silence, and Resource Generation. SLC, 2023-
Undergraduate Courses 2023-2024
Dance
Writing On, With, and Through Dance: A Dance Writing Seminar
Component—Fall
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 to and between performer and witness, including but not 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. Students will be expected to attend two live performances over the course of the semester.
Faculty
Graduate Courses 2023-2024
MFA Dance
Writing On, With, and Through Dance: A Dance Writing Seminar
Graduate Seminar—Fall
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 to between performer and 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. Students will be expectedto attend 2 live performances over the course of the semester.