AUDIO PREVIEW: Jill Sigman

Above/below: Jill Sigman in Hut #5
(Photo: Lindsay Comstock)

The Edges of Performance

A workshop led by Jill Sigman

Saturday-Sunday, June 4-5 (2-5pm)

Location: The Border

1 Grattan Street, Studio 221, Bushwick, Brooklyn

(Take L train to Morgan Avenue)

$15/workshop day

from Hut #5 (Photo: Lindsay Comstock)

 AUDIO PREVIEW

Dancer-choreographer Jill Sigman

talks about The Edges of Performance

Click to play [Play]
(6:32)

Where do the edges of performance lie? Does performing rely on a state of mind, a mode of presentation, a kind of activity, an audience? We will investigate these edges beginning with fine-grained movement explorations that are fueled by the visual and aural fields around us. We will then let ourselves be guided by touch, task, and taste, and eventually arrive at explorations of such activities as planting cooking, or building. We will test out the borders of performing through these activities—performing for ourselves, each other, the space, and the street below.

It is encouraged to take both days of the workshop for a more complete investigation, but it is possible to take one day as a discrete experience.

This workshop is part of the ongoing series CLASSCLASSCLASS. It also coincides with Arts in Bushwick Open Studios.

For more information, 

click here.

Jill Sigman asks questions through the medium of the body. Trained in classical ballet, modern dance, art history, and analytic philosophy, Sigman has been making dances and performance installations since the early 90s. In 1998, she founded her company jill sigman/thinkdance as a vehicle for her performance experiments. In the same year she received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. Equally comfortable on a proscenium stage or crawling in the dirt armed with fluorescent waterguns, Sigman transforms deceptively simple actions into explorations of politics, gender, and society; her work currently exists at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual installation. Sigman’s dances have been produced by such New York City venues as Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Dixon Place, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, Dancing in the Streets, and the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center. Internationally, her work has been shown in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, and India. As a teacher, Sigman offers workshops nationally at colleges and universities; she has been a member of the dance faculty at Princeton University, a movement tutor at the Imaginary Academy in Groznjan, Croatia, a frequent guest teacher in Belgium, and a professor of aesthetics and performance theory at Brooklyn College and The New School. She has recently been teaching in Oslo, Norway, and is currently at work on a multi-site project about huts and sustainable living. See: www.thinkdance.org

Learn more about Jill Sigman in an interview with dancer-writer Siobhan Burke on her blog, phase.shift and on Performance Ritual, a new blog Burke shares with Isabella Bruno. Click here and here.