News & Stories

Stories on the arts across Duke, including news announcements, profiles on student and faculty artists, special features, and guest entries by Duke students.

A Verbatim Play Experience: an Arts+ Student’s Perspective

Arts+ student Aidan Klein recently shared his experience workshopping a new verbatim play with that Duke alum, award-winning filmmaker Daniel G. Karslake (T’87) and his collaborator, acclaimed choreographer/director Javier De Frutos, alongside fellow Duke students.

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Zhixhuan (Miki) Zhu, MFA in Dance ’23: Infinite Infant

Zhixuan (Miki) Zhu is an artist, movement explorer and spirituality devotee. Born in a traditional Buddhist family, she was fascinated by the occult since an early age, and her dance is inspired by it. Her thesis project Infinite Infant is a forty-minute live performance situated in a cosmic underworld. Through dual movements, two entangled feminine spirits share and unveil the infinite reincarnations that elevate love.

Leo Ryan, MFA in Dance ’23: for public view (twenty-four)

Leo Ryan is an interdisciplinary movement-based performance and video artist. Their thesis project for public view (twenty-four) is a solo installation performance that explored queer and transcorporealities in the American South by combining movement, video art and speaking segments derived from memory work-based interviews with another queertrans collaborator from Alabama.

Marika Niko, MFA in Dance ’23: Meshroom

Marika Niko is a choreographer, mover and thinker from Japan. They choreograph immersive, multi-sensorial, embodied gatherings and experiences for audiences to explore different ways of relating relationships to space, to time, to other humansand to other non-humans. Her thesis project Meshroom creates a performance environment that forms an intellectual/intentional community around an open dancefloor.

Brooks Emanuel, MFA in Dance ’23: Moving New Futures

Brooks pursued his M.F.A. to find the most effective ways for him to combine his dual backgrounds in dance and social justice work. For his thesis research, Brooks developed the Moving New Futures workshop, which uses improvisatory movement to help social justice practitioners imagine new possibilities for a just society.