“Good. Steady. Still.” – Master of Fine Arts in Dance First Year Performance

Livestream Link

After a semester of curation and making, this event features works by Kiana Cook, Scott Crandall, Leah Crosby, Ginny Jiang, and Timothy Tsang, students who were enrolled in Dance 532 (Grad Performance) with Professor Charli Brissey in the winter 2024 term. Good. Steady. Still. is a diverse 60-minute show with original lighting design by Mary Cole.

Free tickets are available at the door starting one hour before the performance. Doors open at 7:30 and the show starts promptly at 8pm with no intermission. This performance is made possible through generous support from University of Michigan-Ann Arbor’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance.

Kiana “KC” Cook will present a work on her identity development as a mixed-race child turned woman entitled, Steady Searchin’ for My Halo. Scott Crandall’s Cousin Lizzie’s First Birthday is an experiment in how to lengthen and shrink the distance between performer and audience, and between the audience members from each other. Leah Crosby’s Tenderizing uses junk shop technology to tell stories about learning how to be taken care of. It is an illustrated podcast, it is a puppet show… It is basically a really emo powerpoint presentation. Ginny Jiang’s piece is filled with seemingly ridiculous, abnormal, unsafe, wary, probing actions which hint at the character of a person’s body and movements. Inspired by acts of self-navigation and resistance, Ginny delves into the wilderness of thought and the meaning of wild, free-growing vitality through the power of vision and figuration. Timothy Tsang is debuting a solo as a tribute to the memory of Brian Anthony Moczygemba.

Accessibility: ADA accessible
Content Rating: PG-13 for mild language

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

KIANA “KC” COOK is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and practitioner of street and social dance forms from the African diaspora. She is currently integrating her songwriting, raps, and a loop machine into her performance-making process. Her work is about applying the idea that performance can help people process various topics from identity development to health and communal healing.

SCOTT CRANDALL is an interdisciplinary performance artist, designer, writer, and educator based in Detroit. They create hilarious and thoughtful performances about horrible beloved crumbling America with collaborator Maddy Rager as the Kresge Fellowship-winning duo “Thank You So Much For Coming”. Crandall is currently pursuing an MFA in Dance at the University of Michigan.

LEAH CROSBY is a multimedia artist, collaborator, and genre-bender. They are a daydream creator interested in the empathetic potential of fantasy, the use of play and pleasure, the activation of public spaces, and designing participatory events. With cheeky humor and a flair for the devastating, they use audio, performance, and games to make work that is hilariously sad. They are an MFA candidate at the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design.

LINGJING (GINNY) JIANG is a site-oriented artist, educator, filmmaker, choreographer and dancer, MFA student at the University of Michigan. Ginny’s work have been creating and performing by awarded and commissioned of lots art centers, festivals, galleries, conferences and performance venues including Dance Studies Associations (Argentina, 2024), 2023 Florence Contemporary Art Exchange Exhibition, winner of Montreal women Film Festival and big syn international film festival (london, UK), SPURS Gallery, Peking University Center for Business and Arts Research (China), Edinburgh International Festival, 33rd Korea Dance Festival, The Guardian Art Center, No More Play dance company and more which both nationally and internationally.

TIMOTHY TSANG is a queer Chinese-American dance educator, performer & choreographer. Born in Chicago, IL, Tsang began his dance journey in Shanghai, China, where he started taking classes in street dance styles at a local studio. After a decade in Shanghai, he returned to the Chicago suburbs to complete high school and obtained his BA in Dance from Columbia College Chicago. Many of Tsang’s choreographic endeavors since have centered around inquiries into identity, contributing to a deeper connection with cultural narratives that shape his identity as a queer Chinese-American artist. Currently, Tsang is a graduate student at the University of Michigan, focusing his studies on exploring the intersections between cultures, identities, and dance, with the goal of further developing a multidisciplinary practice and refining his voice as a Queer Chinese-American artist.