Jennifer Monson/iLAND: in tow (premiere)
2-week run!
Friday-Saturday, September 23-24
Thursday-Saturday, September 29-October 1
Pre-attacks: 6-7pm on September 29-October 1*
Every night of in tow is different! If you wish to attend multiple performances, we are offering $10 tickets for each additional performance you attend. Please contact lydia@danspaceproject.org for details.
The Saturday, September 24th performance will be followed by an open discussion of the experimental contexts, questions and concerns that shape the in tow project led by Professor of Performance Studies, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera.
Initiated in 2013 by award-winning choreographer Jennifer Monson, in tow is an ongoing performance research project bringing together 10 artists from 4 different decades. in tow straddles location, discipline, and aesthetic to create an evolving working process driven by what each artist brings to it. The performance itself is a site for destabilizing the familiar, testing new ground, defining difference, and creating a shared practice that resonates with layers of experience, points of view, and perspective.
I was curious about how revisiting the long-term creative relationships I formed in the mid ’80s in NYC with DD Dorvillier, Zeena Parkins, and David Zambrano could activate and reimagine experimental relationships with new artists from other geographies and generations. Starting with the basic question of how and why we experiment, we have spent the past three years developing questions, practices, material, and scores that look at how movement, sound and image can be used to research perceptual, philosophical, and social constructs in our current political and aesthetic contexts. – Jennifer Monson
in tow features artists Susan Becker, DD Dorvillier, Niall Jones, Alice MacDonald, Jennifer Monson, Valerie Oliveiro, Zeena Parkins, Angie Pittman, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, David Zambrano (not performing), and Rose Kaczmarowski (not performing)
Music by Zeena Parkins. Performance by Tilt Brass on September 24 & 29.
*in tow Pre-attacks: Arrive early on September 29, 30 and October 1 to experience some of the underlying infrastructure of the work from 6-7pm. More info here.
Other performances
Jennifer Monson is a choreographer, performer, and teacher. Since 1983, she has explored strategies in choreography, improvisation, and collaboration in experimental dance. In 2000, her work took a new turn to investigate the relationship between movement and environment. This ongoing research has led her into inquiries of cultural and scientific understandings of large-scale phenomenon such as animal navigation and migration, geological formations such as aquifers, and re-functioned sites such as the abandoned Ridgewood Reservoir. These studies provide the means to unearth and inquire into choreographic and embodied ways of knowing and re-imagining our relationship to the environments and spaces humans/all beings inhabit. Her projects BIRD BRAIN (2000-2005), iMAP/Ridgewood Reservoir (2007), and the Mahomet Aquifer Project (2008-2010), SIP (sustained immersive process)/watershed are investigations that have radically reframed the role dance plays in our cultural understandings of nature and wilderness. Her current work Live Dancing Archive proposes that choreography itself is an archival practice for environmental phenomena. Her early choreography has been performed in New York City venues including: The Kitchen, Performance Space 122, and Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church; as well as other recognized national and international venues. She has collaborated with Zeena Parkins, DD Dorvillier, Yvonne Meier, David Zambrano, and many other artists. She has received fellowships from the NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts, The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Lambent Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. She has received two Bessie awards- one for sustained achievement in the field and one for BIRD BRAIN. She is an inaugural Doris Duke Impact Artist.
In 2004, Jennifer Monson incorporated under the name iLAND- Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance. She is currently a Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and a Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont, (2010-2016).