Jennifer Monson premieres "Live Dancing Archive" at The Kitchen

At the outset of Jennifer Monson/iLAND's Live Dancing Archive, the audience sits without benefit of light for a very long time. We hear tiny, ambient sounds of one another breathing, shifting, rustling, settling into an alive, soft darkness. Recalling that Monson recently told me that she had come to think of her audience as the ocean, I'm also remembering a time when I sat and watched the open sea at night, its awesomeness shading into something even more mysterious and compelling than usual and more than a little scary. What's in there? What's down there? 

Jennifer Monson (photo by Valerie Oliveiro)

Live Dancing Archive, presented at The Kitchen, serves as a way for Monson to embody a decade of her history of research and making, her sensitive and searching relationship with ecological systems of environments and communities, and her understanding of herself within all of this as a queer woman, activist and artist. It includes not only her hour-long performance--a collaboration with two brilliant artists, lighting designer Joe Levasseur and composer Jeff Kolar--but also a video installation by Robin Vachal and a digital archive designed by Youngjae Josephine Bae.  Levasseur and Kolar accompany her live for the journey, shaping and toning her austere surroundings: Levasseur striding here and there, adjusting the position and varying intensity of portable lights; Kolar sitting at his table of wonders, manipulating "external weather phenomena, wireless technology systems and human activity" through an array of handmade radio transmitters and receivers. If all of this seems like a pretty packed package, it is indeed, necessarily, packed and yet rendered with elegance.

Having seen a preview of part of the video last year, I limited myself to Monson's live show last evening. Even so, I came away feeling full and privileged to witness the skill and authority of this performance.

Jennifer Monson (photo by Ian Douglas)

In Live Dancing Archive, Monson presents herself as a hybrid creature of fur (fake pelt strapped to her torso, concealing her breasts) and human, womanly flesh (the wide mesh of her translucently pale, footless tights enclosing while revealing the nudity of her lower body). She initiates her dancing by pawing and pushing through the air, unfurling into and swimming into it. She endlessly channels organic forms, many presences coming and going in her movement and aspect. An inner wildness becomes external, and vice versa, all with precise control and calibration of pace, effort and coordination. A brief femme-drag sequence/lipsync to singer Antony's "Bird Gerhl" (with Monson ritually adorned by her costume designer, Susan Becker, in a completely uncharacteristic platinum wig, scarlet lipstick and saffron chiffon sleeves) serves as a solemn moment of vulnerability shortly before we experience, along with her, violent disturbance in the surrounding field of energy and sound.

There's so much more that transpires, in this ferocious, profoundly beautiful presentation, than I can say here. I hope you will jump at your chance to take it all in before Live Dancing Archive ends its run at The Kitchen tomorrow night.

Remaining performances: tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

Vachal's video installation will be on view in the theater today (noon-6pm) and tomorrow (11am-6pm) for free viewing.

Browse, enjoy and subscribe to the Live Dancing Archive site: Click here.

The Kitchen
519 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Getting "Out There" with iLAND

iLAND
presents


Moving Into the Out There

Indeterminacy & Improvisation

in Performance & Environmental Practice

at The New School

A symposium on movement, science, and the environment 

in New York City

March 23, Noon to 8pm and March 24, 10am to 7pm

Moving Into the Out There is iLAND’s fourth annual symposium on dance, movement, and the environment. The two-day event in the heart of New York City brings together dancers, choreographers, designers, ecologists, advocates, and scientists for interactive panel discussions, field workshops, and networking opportunities. This year’s symposium features an in-depth review of PARK, an environmental performance project at Fresh Kills Landfill supported by the 2011 iLAB Residency. Moving Into the Out There will also highlight iLAND’s recent efforts to synthesize insights and discoveries from the past seven years of iLAB collaborative residencies. Detailed event descriptions are attached.

Moving Into the Out There is an open forum for exploring new methods of understanding urban ecosystems through innovative collaborations between practitioners of movement, dance, science, and environmental management. iLAND cultivates a deeper engagement with urban environmental issues through its cross-disciplinary approach, and the annual symposium invites the general public to experience and explore recent works emerging from the iLAND community.

Moving Into the Out There features the work of iLAND’s 2011 iLAB Residency, opening up the results of that collaborative experience to a wider audience for discussion.

Throughout the Symposium, participants share in the process of searching for shared language and collaborative processes that cut across the arts and sciences, focusing on dance and the body as primary mediators of experience, imagination, and knowing. Through Moving Into the Out There, iLAND aims to generate conversation about collaborative practice throughout communities of art and science, instigating new ways of understanding and intervening in contemporary environmental problems – particularly those related to over-development and climate change.

Admission is $5-25 sliding scale. For complete programming and schedule information--and to reserve your ticket--click here, call (347) 573-5547 or email info@ilandart.org.

The New School (Wollman Hall)

65 West 11th Street, Manhattan

(directions)

Layard Thompson: Body and Soul podcast

Bessie Award winner Layard Thompson joins me for a wide-ranging discussion of the interrelatedness of dance and watcher, art and the world in which we live. This week, Thompson will share an evening of new work with choreographer Kyle Abraham of Abraham.In.Motion at Dance Theater Workshop (Wednesday-Saturday, December 3-6, 7:30pm). My interview with Abraham will follow shortly. Program notes--http://infinitebody.blogspot.com. Guest information at http://www.dancetheaterworkshop.org. (c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

MP3 File

Program Notes: Upcoming on "Body and Soul"

Bessie Award winner Layard Thompson joins me for a wide-ranging discussion of the interrelatedness of dance and watcher, art and the world in which we live. This week, Thompson will share an evening of new work with choreographer Kyle Abraham of Abraham.In.Motion at Dance Theater Workshop (Wednesday-Saturday, December 3-6, 7:30pm). My interview with Abraham will follow shortly.

Thompson's Cup...puC......K......Ohhhh, Beauty, full, vessel: is a soul-o dance. It is a score, a channel, a vessel, and a body of work both choreographed and spontaneous. Composed with movement, vocalizations, performance meditations, and a costume and set with collaborator Machine Dazzle, Layard Thompson considers and questions the subjective nature of experience through the container of a performance at Dance Theater Workshop. Lighting brilliance by Chloë Z Brown.

DTW program information and ticketing

The Turning World (62)

"the ghosts of emily dickinson mourn the loss of the american woodlands"
by Mary Armentrout, Critical Correspondence

Dancing at Dead Horse Bay

iLAND--interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance invites you to public engagements for the iLAB 2008 Artist in Residence Program:

Dead Horse Bay

Collaborators:
Sarah White, Choreographer
Angel Ayón, Architect
Gerald Marks, Visual Artist

Saturday, August 16, 2008, 2:00 PM to 8:30 PM
Sunday, September 14, 2008, 2:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Sunday, October 12, 2008 12:30 PM to 7:00 PM

For up-to-date on the Dead Horse Bay project, click here.

For more information contact: info@ilandart.org or 212-375-8283.

Located at Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn

Events are FREE and open to the general public and will happen rain or shine.
Light refreshments will be served

Details on Saturday, August 16 event

“The experience will begin at low tide, around 2:15 PM. There will be dance performance on the tidal flat and a very remarkable bay beach to explore. Sunset, moonrise, and high tide all happen right around 8:00 PM. The alignment of sun, moon & earth is special this month and the full moon will rise in a state of partial eclipse. Our location was chosen as a perfect spot to view the sunset behind Coney Island and the NY skyline and the moonrise/eclipse out of Jamaica Bay.”

Directions and Transportation

Take the #2 Train to the last stop, Brooklyn College/Flatbush Avenue.
Transfer to the Q35 bus. Ask the driver to let you off at the "last stop before the bridge".
Signs will lead you down to our site on the water.
There is a parking lot where Aviation Road meets Flatbush Avenue. Across the street from the parking lot is a path that will lead you down to the site area.

Click here for GoogleMap of the area surrounding Dead Horse Bay.

The experience will begin at low tide, around 2:15 PM and there will be dance performance on the tidal flat and a very remarkable bay beach to explore. Sunset, moonrise, and high tide will all happen right around 8:00 PM. The alignment of sun, moon & earth is super precise this month and the full moon will rise in a state of partial eclipse. (Days ago, our August new moon eclipsed the sun, though you needed to be around Western China to see it!) Our location was chosen a a perfect spot to view the sunset behind Coney Island and the NY skyline and the moonrise/eclipse out of Jamaica Bay.

Dead Horse Bay
Collaborators: Choreographer Sarah White, Architect Angel Ayón, Visual Artist Gerald Marks

Dead Horse Bay, situated along Brooklyn's southernmost waterfront, appears today as a place wedged somewhere in time between an industrial past, return to natural shoreline and an undetermined future. The Collaborators will use this site as a context to explore, reflect and ultimately discourse on the environmental impact of site alterations engineered to meet human needs. Their collaborative project will stem from their combined interests in understanding and interpreting nature, ecology, causality, evolutionary change, structural integrity, assigning value to experience, and examining cultural behaviors both current and historic.

Throughout the three-month residency period, monthly public events, scheduled around the summer full moons, will take place at Dead Horse Bay. Events will include a combination of choreography and movement explorations, temporary site interventions and multimedia documentation and representation. Through environmental assessment, creative interplay, site interpretation and traditional man-nature rituals the collaborators intend to create a forum for understanding and experiencing the effects of use, misuse, isolation and neglect along New York City's coastline.

iLAB is a collaborative residency program between movement based artists and scientists, environmentalists, urban designers/landscape architects, architects and others that integrate creative practice within different fields/disciplines. The goals of iLAB are 1) to invigorate and re-imagine relationships between the public and the urban environment through kinetic experience, 2) to engage artists and practitioners across the disciplines of dance, art, and the ecology of physical interrelationships such that we create and investigate innovative approaches to science, infrastructure, urbanisms, and architecture within a performative context, and 3) to support the development of process in engagement over product such that process is itself a product for artistic and public action.

iLAND is a not for profit organization conceived and formed by choreographer Jennifer Monson in 2004. The organization’s mission is to investigate the power of dance, in collaboration with other fields, to illuminate our kinetic understanding of the world. iLAND, a dance research organization with a fundamental commitment to environmental sustainability as it relates to art and the urban context, cultivates cross-disciplinary research among artists, environmentalists, scientists, urban designers and other fields.

iLAB 2008 is supported in part by the Jerome Foundation and Brooklyn Arts Council, and Robison.

info@ilandart.org 212-375-8283

The necessary wild

A Wilderness, Lost in the City
by William C. Thompson, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The New York Times, May 29, 2008

I was delighted to be introduced to Ridgewood Reservoir by dancer-choreographer Jennifer Monson who is devoted to keeping it as a wild, natural preserve. I ran into her last night at Susan Rethorst's (wonderful!!!) show at Danspace Project, and we were both excited about this op-ed piece in the Times. But Ridgewood Reservoir is not the only "teeming wildlife preserve" in New York City. One of my favorite city haunts is Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, located in Queens, just off Cross Bay Boulevard, about a 10-minute walk from the A train's Broad Channel station. Having access to nature is as necessary to me as the food I eat and the dances I witness!

We are family.
Canada geese at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
Photo by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(c) 2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa


Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, May 26, 2008
Photo by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
(c) 2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Save Ridgewood Reservoir

Riverkeeper

iLand--Interdisciplinary Lab for Art, Nature and Dance

Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge

Ridgewood Reservoir/iMAP Dance Performance

iLAND, Inc. presents

Ridgewood Reservoir/iMAP Dance Performance

Saturday, June 23, 2007 from Dawn to Dusk

at Ridgewood Reservoir, Highland Park, Queens

The performance ushers in summer 2007 with a day of dancing informed and inspired by the unique ecosystems and landscape of the Highland Park Ridgewood Reservoir area.

For reservations, more directions and information www.ilandart.org or e-mail at info@ilandart.org or call 212 375 8283.

Conceived of and directed by Jennifer Monson in collaboration with

Composer- Kenta Nagai

Architects- Gita Nandan and Elliott Maltby of thread collective and

Dancers- Maggie Bennett, Charlotte Gibbons, Mariangela Lopez, Jennifer Monson and Christina Muellenmeister

Field Guides – Uli Lorimer, Native plant curator of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; Johanna Meyer, Choreographer; Heidi Steiner, member of the Brooklyn Bird Club; and Nami Yamamoto, Choreographer and a NYC Parks Department Urban Park Ranger.

Video Documentation – Ryutaro Ishikane, Robin Vachal

Costume Designer - Jocelyn Melechinsky

Production Manager – Ariel Federow

Performing Dawn to Dusk – Maggie Bennett, Charlotte Gibbons, Mariangela Lopez, Jennifer Monson and Christina Muellenmeister.

Performing noon to 1pm: Young dancers from the New Song Studio in Elmhurst, Queens – Kristy Lau, Kelly Lau, Amanda Lee, Annie Lee, Shelley Li, Jessica Santosa, Kelly Shum, Sonja Smeland, Janice Wang.

Performing noon to 4pm:

Musicians – Sean Meehan, Tamio Shirashi, David Watson

Dancers – Yari Alcaraz, Brooke Belott, Azahara Ubera Biedma, Megan Byrne, Eve Chalom, Marie-Charlotte Chevalier, Diana Crum, DD Dorvillier, Milka Djordevich, Christine Elmo, Alexis Halkovic, Chih Chun Huang, Jen Kelly, Molly, Lieber, Andrea Liu, Giorgia Minisini, Margaret Paek, Richert Schnorr, Eryn Rosenthal, Isabelle Thiele, Rebecca Wender, Sarah White, Sara Worden.

Ridgewood Reservoir/iMAP is a year long performance project that investigates the unique landscape of the reservoir. This 50-acre site comprises wetlands, native swamp forest and urban wilderness unusual to the inner city. The artists are involved in a year long process of investigating the ecology of the reservoir with scientists as well as developing a creative process on site that responds to the changing seasons and the dynamic interplay of the human actions and natural phenomenon at play in the area.

The dancing will move around the mile long perimeter of the reservoir in five distinct groups. The audience is asked to take their time walking the edge while watching the dancing, observing the environment and engaging in two architectural exhibits that will display information from a breeding bird census, vegetative mapping, the history and seasonal shifts at the site. Four guides will be on hand to direct and offer information.

The public is invited to come at any time during the day. The majority of the dancers will be performing from noon to 4pm. Bring a picnic, relax, come and go as you please as you enjoy this rare and special urban gem and the dancing that responds to it.

Transportation:

BY BIKE: Three group bike rides will leave from Park Slope, Williamsburg and Downtown Manhattan. Information including exact departure locations and times are available at www.ilandart.org.

BY SUBWAY: J train to Cleveland Street walk 3 blocks to the park, up the hill and to the reservoir. A shuttle will be provided between 11am and 3pm from Cleveland Street.

Ridgewood Reservoir/iMAP is hosted by City of New York / Parks & Recreation and is supported in part by the Multi-Arts Production Fund, a program of Creative Capital, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.

iLand, Inc. interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance investigates the power of dance, in collaboration with other fields, to illuminate our kinetic understanding of the world. ILAND, a dance research organization with a fundamental commitment to environmental sustainability as it relates to art and the urban context, cultivates cross-disciplinary research among artists, environmentalists, scientists, urban designers and other fields.

iLAND is a 501 (c) (3) organization; incorporated in 2004.