Today we’d like to introduce you to Culture Mill
Hi Culture, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Murielle Elizéon and Tommy Noonan moved to the US in 2014, a return to North Carolina for Tommy and a new cultural context for Murielle, following a career of performing, choreographing, and touring in Europe. Enchanted by Saxapahaw, an unincorporated village in rural Alamance County, the pair moved their family and artistic visions to this region and soon founded Culture Mill, a performing arts organization. As artists first, the core of their intention in founding the organization was to create a structure that could sustain their artistic work by being deeply rooted in place and artistic community.
Culture Mill engages our diverse community of collaborators in movement-centered workshops, discussions and Restorative Justice circles, artist residencies, and the creation and presentation of interdisciplinary performances. Community collaborations and engagements and cross-sector research fuel the creation of artworks. Such artworks amplify stories and create spaces for communal embodied imagination, unify individuals amidst deeply isolating issues, and cultivate shared humanity. At the intersection of a range of projects is sustained communal practices that center the body and claim the transformational power of art and storytelling.
Our space, the Culture Mill Lab, utilizes a gift economy that breaks down financial barriers to creation for locally-based artists. In our region, independent artists and grassroots organizations experience limited access to space, presentation opportunities, and funding. Through Culture Mill’s weaving of community- and artist-centered programs, we create an inclusive creative ecosystem in which artmaking is accessible, sustainable, and achievable.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
At the start of the Culture Mill’s founding, Murielle and Tommy were soon confronted with American capitalist culture and how it infiltrates the arts. In the early years of heavy organizational lifting, Tommy and Murielle realized their own work as artists risked taking a backseat to administrative duties. In noticing the disembodiment the conventional nonprofit model presented – a shifting further and further away from artistic sensibilities – Murielle and Tommy sought new possibilities, insisting on centering somatic and artistic logic in organizational practices and growth. They chose to realign their priorities by making artistic work as a mode of developing the organization. This practice manifested a richly dynamic way of creating artistic work that simultaneously drives the development and deepening of community, meaningful relationships, and relationships to the work.
To continue as an artist-led and community-based organization, it was vital to increase Culture Mill’s capacity. With support of a capacity-building grant in 2021, Culture Mill was able to hire Management and Development Director Caitlyn Swett, a dancer, sound artist, and arts administrator with a decade of experience working throughout North Carolina. We believe capacity is fundamental to impact. To advance Culture Mill’s work and sustain our regional arts ecosystem, we must invest in our staff, collaborators, and organizational structure,. Subsequently, the many communities we collaborate with benefit from our increased capacity, programmatic expansion, and depth of relationship.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Culture Mill contributes to the intricate fabric of our arts ecosystem through interweaving multidisciplinary artistic work with community-centered programs. Culture Mill engages diverse communities through movement workshops, artist residencies, and the creation and presentation of interdisciplinary dance performances. Ongoing collaborations include cross-sector work with individuals living with Parkinson’s disease, place-based initiatives that center communities of color, and residencies that invest in emerging historically-underrepresented artists, all of which fuel the creation of artworks. At the intersection of a range of projects is sustained communal practices that center the body and claim the transformational power of art and storytelling.
Though much of our work is independently produced, we regularly partner together with larger institutions in the region. For example, in 2019 we worked together with the American Dance Festival and members of the Duke Movement Disorders Clinic to realize “They Are All” with professional dancers and dancers living with Parkinson’s Disease; 2022 saw the beginning of a multi-year creative partnership with Carolina Performing Arts at UNC; in 2023, NC State Live commissioned “When We Were Queens,” a performance that took place at the North Carolina Museum of Art; and this season will feature another commission from the American Dance Festival titled “How To Be A Visitor”, which will take place simultaneously between Durham, Oslo (Norway) and Kampala (Uganda).
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
At Culture Mill we maintain a commitment to practices — embodied practices, artistic practices, social practices. We believe that the more we practice, the more we are able to take advantage of what some might call “luck.” Another word we use for “luck” is “emergence” — such practices allow us to create the conditions to be aware of and responsive to unique opportunities and possibilities that emerge, seemingly spontaneously, in the course of our work. But this isn’t really spontaneous or random; it is a set of conditions created through a commitment to practice, which allows us to benefit from the generative emergence that might appear to many as luck 🙂
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.culturemill.org/
- Instagram: @culturemill
- Other: https://www.patreon.com/culturemill
