Artists Reach Out: Jennifer Nugent

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 Nugent

Selfie by Jennifer Nugent

Originally from South Florida, I now reside in Brooklyn, NY. I have been performing since age sixteen, most notably with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company from 2009-2014 and David Dorfman Dance from 1999-2007. My practices are profoundly inspired by Daniel Lepkoff, Wendell Beavers, Patty Townsend, and an ongoing collaboration with Paul Matteson. Currently I am working on a new solo project, Up Against, which uses dance (steps, improvisation, shape, and gesture) as a way to articulate my curiosities and allow the vibration and energies that surface within the process of being in the studio to reverberate inside the performance. Recently, I was an artist in residence at the Bodies in Motion Festival supported by A.P.E.@Hawley and the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton, MA. I am a teaching artist at Gibney, Movement Research NYC, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Sarah Lawrence College, NY.

Jennifer Nugent
(photos: Ben McKeown)

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

Prior to the pandemic, I was teaching open classes in the city everyday. My own rehearsal process is postponed for now. A couple of weeks ago, the Bates Dance Festival was cancelled. Paul Matteson and I would have performed our latest duet, and I would have stayed for the duration of the festival to teach. I was selected to be a “Captain” in Bill T. Jones’ newest work, Deep Blue Sea, commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory, leading a group of ten dancers as part of a larger community of one hundred, which was to have its premiere on April 14.

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

My mom signed me up for dance when I was eight. At fourteen I decided I wanted to be a dancer, a showgirl, and continued studying jazz and tap with Linda Rogers Albritton in Miami, FL. Professionally, I performed with production companies on cruise ships and nightclubs. In my twenties, while staying consistent in club and production work, I began studying modern dance, ballet, and contact improvisation.

In 1995 I attended the American Dance Festival and studied contact improvisation with Daniel Lepkoff and Wendall Beavers. Contact Improvisation was the movement source that first allowed me to come into myself and begin to understand who I was, where I was and redirected what I wanted in terms of lifestyle, identity, and career trajectory. The physical ideas and inquiries that I learned from this form has led my practices and helped me develop my own inquiries into technique, presence, and performance.

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

I envision my practices as a constant feedback loop. Inside this loop, multiple ideas and perspectives appear, helping me to refine the one singular nugget I have been working to unravel for quite some time.
My practice is influenced by a deep listening to my physical experiences. For me, this is performative and reflective. Teaching, performing, making, researching, and thinking about how I am relating to my surroundings is becoming more integrated; each practice more dependent on the other.

Through teaching, I can tap into some of my deepest desires as a dancer and as myself, and I wonder if this has to do with the exchange I am having with the students. I think my practice is working out ideas with others. Offering an idea, working through it together, laughing, trying, working through sensation and barrier: working with dance. It is subtle and can be intimate and precarious.

I love tending to this work. The longer I go the less I know, and my attachment to knowing is shifting, and I am practicing ways to negotiate this in performance.

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

My aim is to nurture the proposition of physicality as a theoretical and complex language that resides inside a rejuvenating container of possibility. I see teaching as a collective and collaborative endeavor that spans beyond the dance studio and towards radical listening, philosophy, theory, action, writing, and discourse. I believe teaching is an artform that extends from performance and vice versa; each serving as a pedagogy in and of itself.

In my teaching and performance practice, I work to articulate and share my internal experiences. I work to create spaces where factors such as physical form, space, and community become virtuosic and subtle landscapes for learning and deepening movement. I enrich my practices through sharing and refining my ideas in front of others—a transmission of spoken and gestural language.

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

I step into practice each morning, allowing myself to improvise, whether it is walking, moving, writing, reading something I have been wanting to read for the past half year, or emailing loved ones, students, and friends. I am trying to follow myself; trying to be productive and not productive. I am trying to remember to listen while playing and taking care of my four-year-old son and supporting my fourteen-year-old daughter with remote schoolwork, remote dance, and loss of friend time. I constantly ask myself to bring my practice to the moment. I experience a wonderful sense of yielding in, and I also experience a good helping of resistance. I feel lucky to be navigating this new way of holding space for my family.

During this time, I have started taking early-morning walks. While walking to the East River and back, I listen to walking scores and body scans that friends have recorded as well as guided meditations and talks by Dr. Tara Brach. It has been helpful to be guided by a voice, sometimes a friend's voice, that is also practicing.

Every Saturday, my partner and I take our kids to a beach or a park with trails. The outside time in wide open spaces helps us regroup and bond as a family.

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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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Together: Nugent and Matteson at New York Live Arts

Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson
in their duet, another piece apart
at New York Live Arts
(photo: Ben McKeown)

I regret that I haven't seen Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson dance together for a long time. I well remember considering them among my favorite downtown performers--profoundly thoughtful, sensitive and moving in their artistry. Last evening, I went to New York Live Arts, excited to get reacquainted with these two Bessie winners and dance heroes of mine. I caught the New York premiere season of their duet another piece apart. Please do yourself a favor and go tonight--your last chance this time--if you can still get a ticket.

Nothing will distract you from these bodies. Now and again, that sort of spareness can be refreshing. Let us focus, for a minute, on the genius of the body.

Their low-lit performance space is completely bare and yet does not seem vast around them. They compel our eyes and subdue that gaping space. Labored breath and occasional, mostly muffled asides to each other provide raw, human sound to a space empty of accompanying music or soundscape. They are not even dressed for admiring gaze; items of dance-wear, stripped down late in the piece, suggest increasing vulnerability, increased transparency to each other.

And we don't even need that visual metaphor, really. From the moment Nugent first backpedals into the space and Matteson soon touches his forehead to hers, these two operate like limbs (and heightened senses) of one body. Locking, arching, twisting in and out and back into connection with one another, they each move with elastic, springy, sticky qualities as if puzzle pieces in 3-D animation. But, if they are pieces of a puzzle, they are polished ones that fit just so, with just the right knowing.

For most of the time, their intimate world is so tenderly quiet that I feared the scratch of my pen on my notebook paper would be heard in every corner of the theater. We are each exposed by their dancing.

This visual poetry of their duet's conclusion.... Well, let me leave it at that.

Lighting design: David Ferri

Another Piece Apart concludes with a 7:30 performance this evening. For tickets, click here.

PARTNERING WORKSHOP: October 13, 2-5pm

A toolbox of methods for partnering exploring negative space, interdependent support, responses to touch, and various ways of harnessing momentum. By a quick bridging of improvisation into set work—followed by imaginative reconstruction steps—we develop dances that embolden personal voice within kinetic collaboration.

For information on Nugent and Matteson's partnering workshop, click here.

New York Live Arts

219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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Beller's house of stories

Excerpt from other stories

How many times have I seen versions of other stories? I forget, but it's likely at least three now with the opening of Alexandra Beller/Dances' 10th Anniversary season last evening at Joyce SoHo. And, of course, no matter how many times other stories is seen, it will always be different according to which guest--chosen from among contemporary dance's most fascinating artists--has been tapped to catalyze the current performance.

As described by the company, the game plays out like this: "Each performance is a high stakes event featuring a pivotal, improvisational performance by a guest artist who has rehearsed minimally, if at all, with the company." Yeah, bring it.

Last night, that catalyst was Jennifer Nugent, a lithe, springy, Puckish spirit of vitality and fun. Some of her best moments came near the end of other stories, as she returned to a circle of the dancers, scattering them and, to my mind, dispersing the mystifying fog of gestures and juxtapositions, mosaics of story fragments, dream-like driftings and memories constructed through lush, sensitive choreography and Martijn Hart's beautiful filmwork.

other stories, for me, inspires unconditional love, the way one takes a good friend to heart, accepting that there will always be things about that person that cannot be fully known or comprehended. This seems to be a dance about just that--opening with Hart's videocamera focused on one corner of a lovely Flatiron District building and a couple, just behind its large windows, holding a conversation that we cannot hear. The camera zooms in close but to no avail. We will never grasp what is being said nor know its history or current context. We're left to project interpretations onto the couple's body language and gestures.

We do much of the same throughout other stories with its plethora of imagery. When we hear words, they merely fan out in the general direction of something that we can only imagine out of our own personal experiences: "This is the only place that makes me laugh," or "This is the space that will not close," or the disjointed recounting of a medical history, audibly redacted. We watch inexplicable expressions wash over the face of one or another dancer; the look is soon wiped away, replaced by another or...nothing. It feels as if we're being plunged into the life recall or dreams of not just one person but a whole tribe, simultaneously.

So, of course, it's not going to make sense. And, of course, it makes sense.

Have I mentioned that I love it?

Dancing by Beller, Lea Fulton, Toni Melaas, Kendra Porter, Edward Rice and Simon Thomas-Train plus the evening's guest artist. Original music composed and performed live by Robert Poss. Lighting by Amanda K. Ringger. Costumes by Karen Young. Set design by Brian Ireland.

See other stories at Joyce Soho through April 21. There will be also be a 10th Anniversary Celebration on Friday, April 13. For season schedule details and ticketing, click here.

Joyce SoHo
155 Mercer Street (between Houston and Prince Streets), Manhattan
(directions)

re-Jones/Zane

New York Live Arts has launched its inaugural season with Body Against Body, an exhilarating program of early works by Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, performed by Jones's current troupe members and dance celebrity guests such as Janet Eilber, Vicky Shick, Richard Move and Matthew Rushing. I attended last night's opener, the first of two discrete programs that run through September 25.

Reasons to check in with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at this juncture are many. Body Against Body revisits conceptual works--such as Monkey Run Road (1979) and Continuous Replay (1977), with its full-on, un-selfconscious nudity and lightly ritualistic accumulation and repetition--that remain startlingly airy and clear in structure and delightful today. The troupe season's title can imply a cluster of meanings--the sensuality of flesh against flesh, the playfulness of adept physical instruments directed by equally top-level minds, the supple and sturdy support of one partner for the other. All of these meanings and values can be found in the works on display here as throughout the best of the art Jones has made as survivor of his personal and professional relationship with Zane, who passed in 1988.

Jones and Zane did the one-on-one format especially right. So, if you can still manage to grab a ticket, be sure to see Monkey Run Road (with the choreographers' casually elegant, harmonious roles taken by Talli Jackson and Erick Montes) and Valley Cottage: A Study (1980/1981) with a rotating cast of partners. Last night's pair included Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent, Jones/Zane troupe members and "downtown" dance celebrity artists in their own right. Matteson and Nugent will also appear in Program B's Blauvelt Mountain (A Fiction).

Perhaps, by breathing new life into these historic duets, Jones intends to work some subliminal mojo on any remaining skeptics as he begins his own grand partnership with the former Dance Theater Workshop, host of the original productions of two of these seminal works. It's good to be reminded of where Jones came from, this searching, breakthrough choreographer who now, with Carla Peterson and the rest of the NYLA team, hopes to break down barriers for other artists. His new season should serve as a blessing on NYLA's ambitious venture.

Company performers: Antonio Brown, Talli Jackson, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, LaMichael Leornard, Jr., I-Lin Liu, Paul Matteson, Erick Montes, Jennifer Nugent and Jenna Riegel. Guest artists vary by performance.

With costumes by Liz Prince and lighting by Robert Wierzel


The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in Body Against Body continues tonight and September 20-24 at 7:30; Sundays September 18 and September 25 at 5pm. Pre-show Talk: September 21 with dance critic Marcia B. Siegel and Bill T. Jones.

Post-Show Talk: September 23 with Bill T. Jones, Carla Peterson, Janet Wong and the dance company

Check the box office for ticket availability: 212-924-0077

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)

Kate Weare: As good as it gets

Yes, summer's here, and there's certainly a lot of fun stuff going on around town, including the last bits of the 2008-09 dance season. But make time for Kate Weare Company, which concludes its run at Danspace Project tonight at 8:30. Most dance runs are way too short, and thank Goddess I didn't miss this one!

Weare is our fierce poet of contemporary dance movement, our bold painter of the complex landscape and volatile atmospherics of relationships. She's showing two works at Danspace, both winners--the world premiere of Lean-to, set to a beautiful score played live by Michel Galante & Argento Chamber Ensemble, and the New York premiere of Bridge of Sighs. Weare's grounded inventiveness and exemplary craft--study up, all you cocky, aspiring dancemakers and some of you cocky veterans, too!--are more than matched by the astonishing depth of her dancers' expressive talents. You don't get much better than the likes of Leslie Kraus, Adrian Clark, Douglas Gillespie and Jennifer Nugent, dancers I could watch all day, any day.

So, get there, tonight. The information's all here.

New York pride

Yesterday, after dashing from one show (Doug Elkins's Fraulein Maria at Joe's Pub) to another (Danspace Project's Dance CoOp roundup of artists for the APAP crowd), I realized that an unanticipated feeling had blossomed in me--pride. I felt this pride most intensely while I watched Levi Gonzalez dance tribute, a "research project in progress," as he calls it, a lineup of snippets of movement prepared for him by a virtual Murderors' Row of postmodern choreographers. Before each bit, he'd call out the name of its creator: Luciana Achugar, John Jasperse, Miguel Gutierrez, Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi. I can't say why, exactly, but hearing Gonzalez's clear, resonant voice intoning each name sounded like a roll call of heroes. And I suppose it is. Sitting among all of these presenter folks from all over, I had this flash of pride for New York.

Earlier in the afternoon, I'd been swept away by Elkins's Fraulein Maria, his loving, clever dance-up of The Sound of Music--as hilarious as I'd been promised it would be but completely enchanting and soul-touching, too, which was a total surprise. Elkins packs so much rambunctious dance and comedy into an hour and a stage the size of an East Village bathroom, and his performers could not be more delightful. Too many heroic names to call out here--it takes a village to climb this mountain--but some of the most notable are Arthur Aviles, Nicole Wolcott, Jennifer Nugent, David Parker, Archie Burnett, Mark Gindick, Johnnie Moore and Elkins, the man himself. Next chance you get to see it, just go. You will be charmed and moved to your core.