Program Notes for Choreographers' Evening 2025
Choreographers’ Evening 2025
Curated by Benny Olk
November 22, 2025
McGuire Theater
The 53rd Choreographers’ Evening
Curated by
Benny Olk
Choreographers, in order of appearance
Dance Rec Pickup League
Eva Mohn
Non Edwards
Judith Shui Xian, Erin Landers & Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies
Naomi Crocker
Kae McMahon
Melissa Clark
Maggie Zepp
Carlo Antonio Villanueva
Joseph “MN Joe” Tran
Tonight’s performance runs approximately 70 minutes with no intermission.
Please join the artists after the performances in the Walker’s Cityview Bar.
Accessibility Notes
Audio description services are planned for the 4 pm performance.
ASL interpretation is planned for the 7:30 pm performance.
For more information about accessibility, visit our Access page.
For questions on accessibility, content and sensory notes or to request additional accommodations, call 612-253-3556 or email access@walkerart.org.
Curator’s Note
A Constellation
The dance and performance community in Minnesota is an ecosystem of performers, makers, technicians, viewers, funders, theaters, studios, and institutions that circulate dancing, choreographies, ideas, and energies. Choreographers’ Evening is a clearing in that ecosystem, where artists come to postulate and make visible their work at the Walker Art Center.
Curating Choreographers’ Evening has been an act of making space for how Minnesota dance can be, together. Curation, from an etymological understanding, can be an act of care, attention, and nurturing, a way to give time and space for an artwork to become more itself. Choreography activates the relation of people and ideas through time and space, and exists as a frame or container for dancing. Dancing itself is also a practice of relation, a social encounter which offers the opportunity to participate, to witness, and to wonder about what you see, how you feel, how you want to move, and an invitation to move yourself.
Dancing is a way of sensing and making sense. Dancers continually ask questions, forming an answer while on the way to posing another question, the front ever evolving and changing, the certainty of an answer fulfilled (or not) while the next question is pouring forth, opening up, spilling out. Each moment bridges the known and unknown, and then the next moment arrives and what came before lingers.
This year’s Choreographers’ Evening is a choreographed constellation of artworks. These artworks are whole unto themselves, while their place alongside one another illuminates their relation. As the theorist and writer Manthia Diawara notes “…difference and relation link entities that need each other’s energies to exist in beauty and freedom”. While these works were not made together, they come from a shared ecosystem, and their co-existence in this evening is dependent on one another. Together this constellation reflects and refracts the questions Leslie, Erika, Gabe, Jamie, Eva, Non, Judith, Hannah, Erin, Naomi, Kae, Melissa, Maggie, Carlo, Joe, and I are asking, through and with one another.
I am grateful to all the artists for their devotion and vulnerability in making this evening of dance. Thank you to all who auditioned, it was an immense honor to witness and hear the questions you have in your artwork and practices. I have gratitude for Emma Marlar for her attention, patience, and care in the audition and selection process. I am grateful for Kaya Morris’ dialogue, questions, love, and support in many big and small moments. Thank you to Sherisa Oie and the Performing Arts staff at the Walker for their work and ongoing commitment to shepherding Choreographers’ Evening year after year. Thank you to the technicians and stagehands for their professionalism and collaboration in making these artworks fully themselves.
About the Curator
Benny Olk is a Minneapolis-based dance artist, maker, and teacher. He graduated with a BFA in Dance from New York University, and an MA in New Performative Practices from Stockholm University of the Arts. He has performed in works by Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham, Moriah Evans, Anthea Hamilton, and Mirko Guido. His work has been shown at B100, Stockholm University of the Arts, and Red Eye Theater. His collaboration with Tristan Koepke has been presented at SPACE, Colby College, and CandyBox Dance Festival. His collaboration with Scott Stafford has been presented at Detroit Dance Festival and Franconia Sculpture Park. In addition to community in the studio and after the show, he finds community on the dance floor at the club.
The Artists, in Show Order
Dance Rec Pickup League
Open Court
Performers/Makers: Leslie O’Neill, Eva Mohn, Erika Hansen, Jamie Ryan-Karels, Gabriel Anderson
Dance Rec Pickup League is a group of friends who recreate together. Look for DRPL around town.
Eva Mohn
bum ba dum bum
Choreographer/Performer: Eva Mohn
Eva Mohn is a dancer, song writer, and dance maker straddling the US and Europe. She has worked locally with Morgan Thorson, TU Dance, Black Label Movement, SHE Dance Collective, and Coach Said Not To. In 2010 Eve relocated to Germany to work with Johannes Weiland. In 2012 she began working in Sweden with Cullberg (formerly Cullberg Ballet) with choreographers Deborah Hay, Jefta Van Dinther, Eszter Solomon, Eduard Lock, and Benoit Lachambre. She moved back to Minnesota in 2021 and in 2024 curated the collective Dance Rec Pick-up League. Eva is the 2025 recipient of the McKnight Dancer Fellowship and will engage with Kaz Sherman on a new creation in 2026.
Non Edwards
The Door Does Not Open
Choreographed and Performed by Non Edwards
This dance employs Jeanine Durning’s “nonstopping” practice within a prescribed timeframe and tethered to a handful of predetermined landmarks. Nonstopping is a practice of attention. Jeanine denies that nonstopping is improvisation or composition – its focus is purely on the now, now, now, now, now… Engaging with this practice within a choreography, I strive to bring you with me on this rush of awareness and dissolve a barrier to embodied presence.
Dedicated to Max Silver, this dance’s first audience member, who believed this was something.
Non Edwards is a dancer, choreographer, and GYROKINESIS® Method trainer based in MN since 2009. Born and raised in Iowa, Non earned a BA in Math from Grinnell College and spent two seasons with the 940 Dance Company in Lawrence, KS prior to MN.
As a choreographer, Non creates situations for performers to exercise agency and audience to connect to their own bodies, often working outside of theaters and at the intersection of dance with other forms. Non has choreographed/co-choreographed 9 evening-length dance performances, one dance film, and several shorter dances and videos.
Non dances to know her body and what it represents, and to be a skin for the audience to project onto. Possessing an expansive range, Non has collaborated with artists like ARENA Dances, Doma Dance Theater, Jess Forest, Hatch Dance and Honeyworks, HIJACK, Valierie Oliveiro, Anna Marie Shogren, Jinza Thayer, Morgan Thorson, and Laurie Van Wieren.
Judith Shui Xian, Erin Landers, & Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies (3 Solo Events Presented Simultaneously)
nsoapa
Choreographer/Performer: J.H. Shuǐ Xiān
A branch off of a larger work entitled ‘feral’, a container for heartbreak; proximal to grief, distal from desire. nervous system of a prey animal; alert, skittish, defensive, escapist; hide, or excrete toxins; run, or stay up all night; amygdala & hypothalamus on overdrive.
slipstream
Choreographer/Performer: Erin Landers
A reckoning with messiness and multiplicity— flickering, fragmented, layered. This piece includes material from a longer work, other sights/other sites.
Herons Don’t Cry (version)
Choreographer/Performer: Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies
An elegy reflecting on signs and wonders, loneliness, malaise, self-destruction and moving on. Special thanks to HAVEN, Hatch Dance, Honeyworks, and Aimed Dance for supporting previous incarnations of this work.
J H Shuǐ Xiān is an interdisciplinary choreographer, improviser, and sound artist. She has enjoyed presenting works at venues including Paikka, Fresh Oysters Performance Research (R.I.P.), Public Functionary, Bryant Lake Bowl, Walker Art Center, The Southern Theater, Intermedia Arts (R.I.P.), Frey Theatre (Twin Cities, MN), Rochester Art Center and 9 Herkimer Place (Brooklyn, NY). She has recently enjoyed performing for/collaborating with others, including Dua Saleh, Rosy Simas, Heather Kravas, Shayna Allen, lazer axelrood, Valerie Oliviero, Leila Awadallah, Judith Howard, Shayna Allen, Pramila Vasudevan, Megan Mayer, Emily Gastineau, and Erin Drummond. She is a 2017 Q-Stage: New Works and 2019 Momentum: New Dance Works recipient and was part of the 2022 Red Eye Works-In-Progress cohort.
Erin Landers is a choreographer, dancer, mime, and teacher, currently based in the Twin Cities, MN. Her choreography pursues poetic logic in movement-based work, often integrating a range of performance elements to create a multilayered experience. Her work has previously been presented by Arts On Site, PRELUDE Festival, The Neuberger Museum of Art, MOtiVE Brooklyn, Zenon Dance School’s Zone Program, and University of Minnesota Opera Theatre.
Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies (she/her) is a multidisciplinary dancer, choreographer, and movement educator based in Minneapolis. Her original contemporary and Yiddish dance adaptation of the classic children’s book Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins premiered in 2024 and was hailed by audiences as “infectious”, “dynamic”, and “so great we came a second time.” Over the course of her career she has appeared with the Harford Ballet, Charleston Ballet Theatre, and sub.set dance, as well as in projects led by Carla Mann, Becca Cerra, and Helen Hatch (Hatch Dance)/Berit Ahlgren (HoneyWorks). As a choreographer, Hannah has been commissioned by Ballet Co.Laboratory, Threads Dance Project, and Rhythmically Speaking, and supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Everwood Farmstead Foundation. Her work has been presented at the Walker Art Center, Southern Theater, Park Square Theatre, Barnstorm Dance Festival, Midwest RADfest, and more. Find her at hannah-mm.com.
Naomi Crocker
Move On
Choreography, performance, and text by Naomi Crocker
Technical assistance (After Effects) by Ian Babineau & Michael Legan
This choreography will be a poem, poetry in motion, possibly a dance, definitely a reflection, and ideally an invitation. It will also be a careful gesture to loss and renewal.
A constellation of elements that I was thinking about in creating this work include:
– The etymology of “choreography” – from Greek khoreia ‘dancing in unison’, from khoros (‘chorus’) + -graphy (‘writing’)
– The emotional and physical experience of taking a hiatus from an embodied dance practice for whatever length
– Notions of accessibility related to dance, particularly for audiences and particularly when dance is presented within a formal, institutional setting
– “I’m not me today, I’m me today”
– Histories of dance works that incorporate spoken word
– Histories of dance works that experiment with the audience/performer relationship
– Animation, in all its forms and connotations
I would like to thank Benny for believing in and stewarding this work, my partner Michael, Ian for his technical and typeface expertise, and all the choreographers, dancers, and Walker colleagues whom I have had the fortune of being in deeper community with for this year’s Choreographers’ Evening.
Naomi Crocker is a Minneapolis-based artist, educator, researcher, and cultural professional, most closely connected to museums and other arts and culture non-profits. She is drawn to acts of facilitation, but also utilizes installation, performance, sculpture, sound, and text-based practices. Naomi’s projects often consider human and non-humans’ relationships with language (oral, written, gestural, and otherwise) and she is frequently inspired by linguistic histories, processes, and structures. Naomi has exhibited, performed, and curated programming primarily at artist-run spaces around Minnesota, including RESOURCE, Belwin Conservancy, The LAB Theater, Pancake House Mpls, Century College Niche Gallery, MirrorLab Studios, and KFAI Radio. She currently serves as Chief of Staff at the Walker Art Center and enjoys reflecting on the challenges of thriving as an artist in a U.S. context, as well as how arts and culture administration can be framed and lived as a creative endeavor.
Kae McMahon
Structure Test
Choreographer: Kae McMahon
Performers: Kae McMahon and Andrew Lee
We offer you to access your child-curiosity and adult reflection.
We offer lenses of eutectic zones, percolation threshold, present absence, commodified community.
We offer this context:
“The commodity effectively becomes the form in which all manifestations of life appear, the objective form itself both of object and subject – love, for example, appears from now on as a regulated exchange of orgasms, favors, sentiments, where each contracting party is ideally to benefit equally…
Nothingness has visibly taken up residence in the intimate depths of things and beings, interchangeable symbols that replace each other moving about on one plane…
All that is separated remembers that it was once unified, but the object of this memory is in the future. Such reunification only operates on the terrain of their separation itself.”Excerpts from Tiqqun, 1999-2008
This piece was choreographed collaboratively. Immeasurable gratitude to Andrew Lee for filling big shoes, willingness, and friendship. We offer gratitude to the faculty of St. Olaf College, Macalester College, and Carleton College especially Judith Howard, Jinza Thayer, and Heather Klopchin for their encouragement and support, and to TU Dance for rehearsal space and artistic support, without which this piece and our creative endeavors would not exist.
Movement as a practice of gratitude, gratitude as a practice of movement.
Kae McMahon is a clumsy dancer, disorganized organizer, recreational farmer, vocational dyke, and emerging choreographer based in Minneapolis, Mni Sota Makoce on occupied Dakota land. Their past, present, future work share inquiry into biopolitics, rigor, somatic utopianism, impact, liberatory eschatologies, ecstaticism. Kae relocated to Minneapolis after graduating with a B.A. in Dance and Environmental Studies from St. Olaf College in 2023. Since then, they have had the privilege of performing in works choreographed by Gabby “The Baddie” Abram, Mathew Janczewski & Taja Will, Haze Harrison, Alys Ayumi Ogura, and Erika Martin, amongst others. Their choreography has been performed at MOVO Space (Minneapolis) and University of Nebraska (Lincoln). They extend immeasurable gratitude to all who have informed their movement practice/thinking body (directly or in lineage), to those who hold them, to those who have passed, to those who could not be present.
Melissa Clark
Guerreira Feminina
Choreographer/Performer: Melissa Clark
Melissa Clark is an alumna of Florida A&M University, a performing artist, instructor, and lifelong student based in the Twin Cities. Originally from Gary, Indiana, her artistry began in dance at age two and music at age four. She travels domestically and internationally to study traditional dance and rhythms, exploring how history shapes movement and culture across the African Diaspora.
A 2020 McKnight Dancer Fellow, Melissa’s artistic interests center on the cross-cultural intersections of dance and the arts, reflecting a deep commitment to cultural preservation and exchange.
Her background includes Afro-Brazilian forms—Capoeira, Dança Afro, Orixá, and Samba—alongside Afro-Cubantraditions such as Orisha and Rumba, as well as Ballet, Contemporary, Jazz, Modern/Afro-Modern, and traditional dances from Ghana, Guinea, Haiti, Liberia, and Mali.
Maggie Zepp
I’ll post new photos of the infected area in the comments
Choreographer/performer: Maggie Zepp
Music: Tony Banks “From the Undertow”, Reymour “Je te tiens, Tu me tiens”
I wanted to make a dance about the kind of white-knuckled fervor with which I grasp onto my identity as a dancer. Sometimes I’m grateful for that intensity and sometimes it feels melodramatic, particularly amidst the cinematic suspense of this moment. I’m afraid I’m one of those people who makes everything about themselves, but I indulged in that a bit and tried to sit in the center of my inspirations. Thank you to Benny for this opportunity and thank you to the other Choreographers for sharing this Evening. If you are interested in purchasing this dance, please email me at maggiezepp@gmail.com
Maggie Zepp is a dancer and choreographer.
Carlo Antonio Villanueva
ghost/mirror
Choreographer/performer: Carlo Antonio Villanueva
ghost/mirror calls memories and senses back to the present through Carlo’s live dancing.
Carlo Antonio Villanueva (he/him, b. 1986) is a Filipino American performer, choreographer, scholar, and Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. A few of his deep influences in dance and performance include Miriam Gabriel, Moriah Evans, Faye Driscoll, Merce Cunningham, Janet Wong, and Bill T. Jones. His favorite environments for working are in choreographic process, studio practices, performance coaching, and improvisation. Carlo is a 2024-2026 OMNIVERS Artist with Red Eye Theater, a 2025 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and a grant recipient of the inaugural 2025 Bridge Fund for Dance from the City of Minneapolis. Carlo is at home on Lenapehoking and Bde Óta Othúŋwe/Gakaabikaang. carloantoniovillanueva.com
Joseph “MN Joe” Tran
Flowers
Choreographer/performer: Joseph “MN Joe” Tran
Dramaturge: Emma Marlar
Music: “Who Loves You” by The Jackson 5 & “Hey Joe” by Medeski, Martin & Wood
Music mixed by: Zack Rose
Flowers pays tribute to the past with acknowledgment and acceptance through departure.
Joseph “MN Joe” Tran is a founding member of BRKFST Dance Company based in Minnesota and is a former member of the world-renowned breaking crew Knuckleheads Cali, respected for their uniquely intricate and non-traditional methods of movement. Tran is known for his signature moves which have earned him first-place victories in breaking competitions across the US and Europe. He is the recipient of the 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Dance and 2019 McKnight Dancer Fellowship. Tran has choreographed original works which have premiered at various venues such as The Walker Art Center, Southern Theater, and Orchestra Hall with the Minnesota Orchestra. He has toured internationally to Dublin, Ireland for Dance2Connect Festival, to Vancouver, BC for the Vancouver International Dance Festival, and nationally with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and Des Moines Symphony. Tran has set repertoire with BRKFST at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Dance Ireland, and Bates Dance Festival.
Joseph Tran is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
Fall of Freedom
This weekend, the Walker is participating in Fall of Freedom, a nationwide creative resistance. To learn more, go to www.falloffreedom.com.
Living Land Acknowledgment
The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
Acknowledgments
To learn more about upcoming performances, visit 2025/26 Walker Performing Arts Season.