Artists Reach Out: Jennifer Monson

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Jennifer Monson

Jennifer Monson
(photo: LaTosha Pointer)

Jennifer Monson (Artistic director of iLAND-interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance) uses choreographic practice as a means to discover connections between environmental, philosophical and aesthetic approaches to knowledge and understandings of our surroundings. She creates large-scale dance projects informed and inspired by phenomena of the natural and the built environment. Her projects include BIRD BRAIN (2000-2006), iMAP/Ridgewood Reservoir (2007) Mahomet Aquifer Project (2009), SIP(sustained immersive process)/watershed (2010), Live Dancing Archive Vol. I & II (2012 and 2014), in tow (2015) and bend the even (2018). Monson has been on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign since 2008 and was a Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont (2010-16). In 2017 iLAND published A Field Guide to iLANDing:scores for researching urban ecologies. www.ilandart.org

Jennifer Monson's Live Dancing Archive
(photo: Valerie Oliveiro)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

My current project MOVE THING, comes as the 20th anniversary of BIRD BRAIN arrives. I am again thinking about mobility and migration but, this time, from the point of view of toxicity and human disturbances of natural systems--things like nuclear waste, toxic chemical and pollution disposal, extraction industries such as mining and forestry, and military sites such as ammunition plants and testing sites.

I am looking for the ways in which disturbed systems radically evolve towards new forms of survival and novel ecosystems--the unexpected and hard-to-perceive actions of life that adapt to what humans understand as drosscapes or perverted wastelands.

This work requires a quieting and deep listening. I am drawn to the abandonment of these places and the kinds of movement that happen there that is difficult to render, to endure or find comfort in. I am searching for  the echoing possibility in these places.

Dancing has become more and more a practice of disintegration and dissolving for me. I have been working with solubility--moving beyond the porous body to the material essence of presence that one can dissolve into, by becoming a part of while remaining a distinct yet morphing entity. It is a complicated idea as I read it through various cultural lenses. And it seems to be located in my interest in not doing harm, belonging with other entities, moving alongside with healthy friction and resistance when it is needed and sustaining movement and flow when it is not.

My own movement practice brings me to sensing vibration and frequency. Aligning with and strengthening patterns that I sense but don’t necessarily comprehend. Dancing lets me be with the animacies of the world without having to know and this unknowing seems particularly helpful in this moment.

This practice gives me a sense of belonging with the COVID 19 virus and others. I want to actually support it, be with it, as it mutates in our perception and then disappears. It is not the enemy. Our disastrous and ineffective health care system and economic system, rife with inequity, is the enemy.

So, sensing the mobility of this virus, attending to how it changes our behaviors and activates our sense of care for each other, is helping me to think through the larger issues of MOVE THING, and I am grateful for that.

Beyond that, all of my upcoming projects for the spring, summer and fall have been postponed indefinitely.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I spent a lot of time climbing rocks in the high desert in California as a child. For me this is dancing with animate partners of various scales and consciousness. I had two creative movement teachers from the time that I was 5 years, one in elementary school and one in afterschool. Those classes helped me find my way of being in the world and gave me a sense of knowing the world through improvisation and movement that set me on my path.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

Before this COVID-19 stuff started, I was so busy in my life as an artist, professor, and director of a non-profit, that I decided I had to find a way to dance in small windows of time in my life. I started dancing with the trees on my morning dog walk.

What I noticed and was reminded of is how dancing while observing the world--and, in this case, trees--helped me to observe and know things about the trees that I hadn’t before. Now, I am seeing the “habit” of trees, the ways stems and branches angle, the rate at which buds grow in relation to their proximity to other trees and access to light. Texture of bark, and imagining the root systems and their interaction with mycelium.... I sense the diastolic pressure of xylem and phloem as transpiration begins to happen more fully in the spring.

The trees are still bare here in Illinois, so the ‘habits’ are quite clear and evocative. I have been thinking about how, in this practice, I move between metaphoric, embodied, poetic, scientific and associative understanding. This is improvisation to me, the simultaneous awareness of multiple modes of understanding something--moving with multiple potentials at once.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

At the moment, one of the things that comes up for me is the hubris of humans. There is something humbling about sensing how my body hosts other life--all of the bacteria and viruses, for that matter, that survive in my body, how my bodily and psychic secretions excretions are a part of the world. I’m no more important than the asphalt on the street, the woodpecker out my window. I have to listen to the part I need to play to keep things moving, thriving, living and dying.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

I’ve been dancing over FaceTime with close friends that I have known for a long time. My embodied practices give me tools for connecting across distance. I find myself listening into their spaces with more dimensionality. I don’t just stare at the flat surface of the screen, I send my voice and my movement into their space. I let their movement and sound enter the entire space that I am in. It’s like watching the first person walk on the moon. There is an intense feeling of empathy, connection and humanity and at the same time that pixilated echo of distance.

My work has always addressed scales of knowledge and comprehension through dancing, and this is functioning in new and exciting ways for me. The moon-walking metaphor continues to resonate with me, especially that description that astronauts give of looking back at the marble of the earth. At some point the scale of that marble would have been the scale of my laptop screen. And I sense the whole world in those moments of dancing through the screen with my friends.

I’m someone who really would prefer not to look at a screen ever, so this acceptance and embracing of the connection it offers is teaching me something new.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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