Live Dancing Archive Volume I premiered at the University of Vermont in October of 2012 and was performed at The Kitchen, NYC, NY; Krannert Art Museum, Urbana, IL; Chicago Humanities Festival, IL; and Columbia College Improvisation Festival, Chicago, IL in 2013.
For the web-based archive of this project, see the website here.
Choreography: Jennifer Monson
Music Composition: Jeff Kolar
Lighting and Stage Design: Joe Levasseur
Costume Design: Susan Becker
Video Installation: Robin Vachal
Digital Archive: YoungJae Josephine Bae
Production Manager: Davison Scandrett
Dramaturgy: Betsy Brandt
Live Dancing Archive Volume II was premiered at New York Live Arts, October 2014, and at The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, as part of THE HOUSE IS OPEN- a pop up installation and performance event, November 2014
Choreography: Jennifer Monson
Performance: Jennifer Monson, Niall Jones, Tatyana Tenenbaum, Valerie Oliveiro
Music Composition: Jeff Kolar
Lighting and Stage Design: Joe Levasseur, Valerie Oliveiro
Costume Design: Susan Becker
Video Installation: Robin Vachal
Digital Archive: YoungJae Josephine Bae
Production Manager: Davison Scandrett
Selected Press:
Artist to Artist Talk: Jennifer Monson and DD Dorvillier on the body as archive
‘Bird of a Feather’, Brooklyn Rail Review – Cassie Peterson
‘Bringing Nature Inside With Space and Light’, New York Times Review – Siobhan Burke
Live Dancing Archive at the Chicago Humanities Festival
‘Improvising, a Mover Lets You See Her Think’, New York Times Review – Gia Kourlas
‘Migrating Back to the Wilds of the Stage’, New York Times Feature – Brian Siebert
‘The Body as an Object of Interference: Q + A with Jeff Kolar’, Rhizome – Maura Lucking
New York Times, Dance Listings – Rosalyn Sulcas
Jennifer Monson, ‘Master Improviser’, Dance Magazine – Wendy Perron
‘Exposed in Flight’, Danceviewtimes – Martha Sherman
Interview with Jennifer Monson, The Dance Enthusiast – Trina Mannino
WNYC Radio Broadcast – Brian Siebert
Time Out NY, Critics Pick – Gia Kourlas
American Realness, New York Times Review – Alastair Macaulay
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Live Dancing Archive Volume I proposes that the body has the possibility of archiving and revisiting multiple scales of experience. Specifically, Monson looks at how experiences of environment and ecological dependencies are registered through physical movement. Live Dancing Archive negotiates and explores what a queer ecology might offer for dancing bodies and rapidly shifting conceptions of place. Furthermore, the piece looks at how Monson’s navigation of her own queer, feminist and animal-like body has shaped relationships to cultural and social phenomena.
The choreography draws upon more than a decade of Monson’s own dance-based environmental research, particularly her 2002 piece BIRD BRAIN Osprey Migration, an eight-week dance project and tour along the Atlantic Flyway, the bird migration route that extends from the northern Atlantic Coast to South America. The video installation and digital archive elements of the piece query the process of archiving as well as the shifting nature of dance, and environmental phenomena.
Vachal’s installation distills 50 hours of video documentation from BIRD BRAIN into a three-hour single channel video loop. The video addresses duration, sensation and multiple scales of movement, while providing an alternative perspective into the creative research process, performances, workshops, and community engagements of the extensive tour. Bae collaborated with Monson to make the web-based archive, www.livedancingarchive.org, Monson hopes the site will make a meaningful contribution to contemporary discourses about archiving dance and environmental projects.
Kolar uses the electro-magnetic spectrum of radio frequencies to compose an indeterminate score that intensely alters our perception of the space. Levasseur continuously reshapes the visual experience of the space by shifting a mobile horizon line and a range of lights in response to the spaces generated by Monson’s movement. Becker’s costumes allow Monson to transition from human to phenomenon, space invader to pop star, heroine to pedestrian, and bird to rock.
Live Dancing Archive Volume II expanded the investigation of the body as archive by transmitting the dance knowledge of Live Dancing Archive Volume I to Niall Jones. Valerie Oliveiro and Tatyana Tenenbaum. How does the work transform as it moves through and with different dancers?
The addition of the new collaborators highlights the infinite possibilities of archiving indeterminate systems and explores the creation of novel ecosystems – a term borrowed from environmental science. Novel ecosystems “differ in composition and/or function from present and past systems”
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. 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.