Live Dancing Archive at The Kitchen

“What does it mean when an artist gives everything to pursue an idea to the bitter end? Of course it’s rare, but in this case it’s also a work delivered with supreme elegance.” – Gia Kourlas, New York Times

 

 

Jennifer Monson’s newest work, Live Dancing Archive, is a visceral exploration of the dancing body as a physical archive of experience and place. Drawing from more than a decade of dance-based environmental research, Live Dancing Archive has been choreographed using material from video documentation of The BIRD BRAIN Osprey Migration (2002)—an eight-week dance project along the Atlantic Flyway—in addition to improvised scores accumulated over the past decade. The full evening-length solo performance is accompanied by two additional components, a video installation and a digital archive, which query the process of archiving as well as the shifting nature of dance and environmental phenomena.

Proposing that the body has the possibility of archiving and revisiting multiple scales of experience, Monson specifically looks at the way experiences of the environment and ecological dependencies are registered through physical movement. The work further explores how Monson’s navigation of her own queer, feminist, and animal-like body has shaped relationships to cultural and social phenomena. Live Dancing Archive negotiates and explores what a queer ecology might offer for dancing bodies and rapidly shifting conceptions of environment and place.

Collaborators include video installation by Robin Vachal, sound design by Jeff Kolar, lighting design by Joe Levasseur, costume design by Susan Becker, and digital archive design by Young Jae Bae.

This program is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This program is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Support for dance programs at The Kitchen is provided by Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Additional support provided by a Creative Research Award and Research Board Grant from the University of Illinois of Urbana Champaign and the Marsh Professorship at Large program at the University of Vermont.