Monet Hurst-Mendoza is researching the fifth play in her cycle about working-class women in Yucatan, Mexico, where her family is from. Moriah Evans is developing choreography projects for Nuremberg, Germany, Performa in New York City, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Melih Kirac, a dance artist, is creating a multimedia piece centered on an imaginary dancer living in 20th-century Turkey, his homeland.
What the three have in common is that they are in residence at the Watermill Center now through Friday, Feb. 21, and they will be available to discuss their projects and how they develop new work as part of In Process @ the Watermill Center tomorrow at 5:30 p.m.
The three residents make up the first cohort of the Watermill Center’s 2025 Artists in Residence program, which will bring 58 multidisciplinary artists from 18 countries to the center for fully funded residencies from January to June and September to December. (The International Summer Program, for which applications are now open, will bring more than 20 artists to the center between July 7 and Aug. 2.)
Elise Herget, the center’s managing director, discussed how more than 500 applications are whittled down. For the past four years, former Watermill resident artists — there are over 1,500 alumni — are engaged as jurors, with two to four assigned to each discipline, depending on the number of applications.
The criteria? “The quality of the work is one,” Ms. Herget said. “Then, how it fits into Watermill, will they be able to execute what they’re proposing, and, finally, does it fit into the ethos of experimentation that Watermill has always carried forward.” The selection process also strives for a balance of writers, performance artists, and visual artists.
Each juror reviews between 50 and 100 applications, with multiple eyes on each one. The final decisions are made by an internal Watermill committee. “At that point it’s like a balancing act, how do the schedules match up, making sure it’s international, diverse, multidisciplinary,” Ms. Herget said. “That hones it down to the final selection.”
Residents get a stipend, all of their meals, the use of cars if needed, and housing. For many years, the dormitory was housed in the main building, which is now the Robert Wilson Archive and Study Center, named after the center’s founder and artistic director. A dedicated residence that can house as many as 15 artists opened in 2020 on property next to the center.
Ms. Hurst-Mendoza has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Ucross, Stillwright, La MaMa Umbria International, Millay Arts, the Mitten Lab, and Space on Ryder Farm. Of Watermill, she said, “It’s different from other residencies I’ve had. What I really love about the center is that all of the artifacts around here are super inspiring,” citing, among other things in the collection, chairs by Donald Judd and Isamu Noguchi. “And the library is so cool, it is a truly eclectic collection.”
The play she is researching while at the center is about the construction of the Tren Maya, a new high-speed railway in the Yucatan. While she noted that the project will provide many jobs for Mexican citizens and bring commerce to the region’s more rural areas, there is a downside.
“More tourism can equal more ecological disasters, because these small rural towns are not set up for a large influx of people. It can affect waterways, septic systems, and some are strong ecological sites, such as the Calakmul Biosphere, which is the second-largest jungle next to the Amazon. So it provides a lot of our oxygen, as well as a homeland for Mexico’s jaguar population.”
Because her play cycle focuses on working-class women, it will include women who are constructing the railway and Indigenous female activists working to stop it. Her previous play, “Torera,” is about a female bullfighter in the Yucatan whose ambitions collide with legacy, tradition, and family secrets. Published by Concord Theatrical, it is available for licensing on that group’s website.
Ms. Evans collaborates with dancers, scenographers, musicians, and visual artists on site-specific performances, theater productions, and installations. She has received a Hodder Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has created performances for MOCA, Los Angeles; Performance Space in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Sculpture Center in Queens, among others. She has brought three collaborators to the Watermill Center for her residency.
“I work in the expanded choreographic field,” she said, “so I think about choreography not only as designing movement of bodies in space, but as an infrastructural question, choreography as something that is part of the social fabric of the world we live in. Performance is everywhere all the time, because we perform ourselves in the social field. So what choreographs our relations to each other? How do I sit? How do I stand? Why? In front of whom?”
Asked what the audience can expect tomorrow, she said, “That’s a good question. I don’t know. Some physical material as well as some improvised scores.” She said she has been working on something called the “Pedestrian Horizontal” and thinking about the passivity of the body and the militarization of the body, “like the difference between lounging and marching, for example.”
As with Ms. Hurst-Mendoza, she cited the center’s collection as an inspiration, “all these artifacts from different places and times and cultural points of view and different ideologies. It is really rich to be able to be around those things, and, because it isn’t a museum, you can actually touch them and bring them in proximity to your ideas and to your practice. And it’s nice to meet other artists and the people who work here as well. You’re in a little bubble, in a positive way. For me, that’s what residencies are for, to go away and focus.”
This is Mr. Kirac’s first visit to the United States; he left Istanbul only five days before the residency began. He called the residency “definitely amazing. It’s pretty unusual, different from my usual working conditions, and I’m really happy.”
He has worked with one of Istanbul’s independent troupes, Ciplak Ayaklar Kumpanyasi, and is a research assistant and lecturer at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul.
He is working on “Past Landscapes,” about an imaginary figure of a dancer living in the 20th century and “trying to question through this imaginary figure the individuality and the modernization or Westernization in Turkey. We are between the East and the West. In the process of creating the republic we have lots of practices, in costume, in writing, we changed our alphabet, we changed our calendar, we had some practices in the performing arts, too, so through this figure that does not exist I want to ask some questions.”
He is in the beginning phase of the project at the center. “I’m trying to film this character by using some vintage motion picture cameras, and then I will try to create a multimedia space.” He said that, tomorrow, “I will probably share some dancing, some improvisation.”
Tomorrow’s program is free. Registration on the center’s website has been recommended.
