Jeanine in rehearsal with Ros Warby for Deborah Hay's project with Motion Bank, Frankfurt Lab, 2012. Credit: Amin Weber
Hometown: Cornwall, NY and NYC
Current city: Newburgh, NY and NYC
Age: 48
College and degree: BFA, Tisch School of the Arts, Dance
Graduate school and degree: MA, Choreography, Amsterdam School of the Arts (age 43)
Website: http://www.jeaninedurning.com/
How you pay the bills: Teaching, advising, mentoring, grants/awards, commissions/making and setting work on companies, performers and/or students, freelance performing/dancing, teaching Pilates
All of the dance hats you wear: Choreographer, director, performer, advisor, mentor, teacher, administrator, bookkeeper, grant writer, fundraiser, manager, researcher, curator, panelist, psychologist (only half kidding)
Non-dance work you do: I currently teach in-home Pilates but in the past I have cleaned houses, baby sat, and cater-waitered.
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Describe your dance life in your….
20s: The 20s were generally weird, and specific to dance, even weirder. I was obsessed and incredibly focused around dance (I guess I still am) but I always thought I had to do more or something different and better to get where I wanted to get. Which I suppose gave me that balance of determination and drive. I was never good enough, in my mind. I essentially focused my life around taking as many classes as I could, once I left NYU. Coming up as a dancer in NYC in the mid to late 80s was incredible. Everything was happening but I didn’t nearly take advantage of the city as I could have. I was a hermit. And shy. I thought I knew what I was doing and where I was going and how to get there but I didn’t. I was fortunate to see a lot of great artists at that time – both theater and dance. I went to see a lot of film – when there were still a lot more revival houses than there are now. That shaped me. I was familiar with the city – having spent half of my childhood there with my father and I suppose I took it for granted. I was also making work but at the time I never thought to call myself a choreographer. At that time, I aspired to be a dancer in a company but oddly enough I was always in the studio, working on something. Usually by myself. I was also freelancing as a dancer. Doing a lot of projects. Most of the people I worked with really influenced me, and some of them – I don’t even remember their names. I basically said yes to everything because I had learned that that makes you better at what you do. I still agree with that to a certain degree. It also puts things in perspective and gives you humility and makes you adaptable. I was desperate to dance with Twyla Tharp, and then devastated finally when I realized that would never happen. I turned the obsession onto Trisha Brown, and then also realized that would never happen but had become used to disappointment by then so dealt with it better when I wasn’t asked back at the audition. I think I was 26 when David Dorfman asked me to join his company. Everything changed after that because I was actually making money for being a dancer. In a way, it was good but in a way, it kind of ruined me because I got the idea then that I could actually make a living dancing.
30s: I was touring a lot with David. We were working a lot and I was on the road a lot. I met a lot of people, engaged with different communities outside of NY. I really learned what it meant to be a professional dancer – going to work, to the studio every day, whether I wanted to or not, to collaborate with others, to not always agree, to have conflict and still have to be productive and creative, to work well under every kind of condition, to be adaptable. I learned how to be a better performer by doing it a lot. And through performing so much I think I became a better improviser and understood that these two things are not very different – even if the work is “set.”
I also started to teach more in my 30s. At first on the road as part of David’s company, but then more and more on my own. I was offered teaching gigs at universities and also set work on university students. The teaching for me became an essential aspect of understanding what my priorities were, how things that I thought were important about dance or the performance of it, just really weren’t. I also began to find a language that could articulate my philosophy, my concerns, my politics – that somehow always got filtered through the rubric of dance.
During this time, I also started to claim myself as a choreographer, even though I had always been making work anyway and the practice was ongoing, the label made something more definitive. So when I wasn’t in the studio with David, I was in the studio for a project of my own. I started to understand more how to navigate my interior world and externalize it and the structure of my thinking, represent it through movement, and choreographic structures. Not always successfully. It was messy out there.
40s: I think the biggest thing I’ve learned and am continuing to learn in my 40s is that the messiness that I refer to above is not something that needs to be formalized or contained. Dance for me has become a much more global and holistic practice that doesn’t always find its container in the body moving according to learned behaviors or historicized forms. It’s a philosophy, it’s a spiritual act, it’s perceptual gymnastics, it’s time traveling, it’s psycho-emotional excavation, it’s social communion. The other thing that I’ve realized and something that is not necessarily a comfort is that once you reach a certain stage, not determined by age always, meaning the more the world opens up to you through this elusive practice called dance, there is no turning back.
From inging, Frascati WG, Amsterdam, 2010.
What is on your plate/calendar for 2015?
The big thing is that I have a show coming up in September at The Chocolate Factory in Queens. The time in between projects gets longer and longer for me both because of economics and just because my processes and research within them have become longer and more involved. I have been working on a project called nonstopping that started with the process that eventually became the performance practice inging that I first publicly performed in 2010 and have been performing on and off since then. I started a companion practice to inging that I bluntly call nonstop moving. I will “premiere” that in September as well as perform inging.
Other than that:
I’ll be in Berlin for the month of May, teaching at an undergraduate program for choreography through the HZT.
I think I will go to Stockholm in June for a symposium on choreography and the visual arts. Teaching a lab based on language production in choreographic practices.
I’ll perform inging in San Francisco, in November, and also teach a choreographic workshop there.
Possibly tagging a performance of inging after, in LA.
In December I’ll go to Rennes to transfer/transmit the practice of nonstop speaking that inging is based on to a young French choreographer who will adapt the work and premiere it at the Avignon Festival next year.
Then in January next year, I’ll go to Toronto for a month to make a new work on Toronto Dance Theatre.
Please tell us about your current project, inging.
There’s a lot to say about inging or many ways to talk about it. It is the work that changed my relationship to performing. It’s the work that terrifies me and keeps me going. It emerged as a result of my having a kind of artistic crisis and came during a period of true creative paralysis. That’s the under belly of the work for me. The hidden dramaturgy. inging is a frame through which I am able to fluidly navigate all aspects of who I am in an ongoing present. And the present includes the archive of the self as well as the not-yet of becoming. My learned self as well as a fantasy self. Memories as well as projections as well as perceptions. Practically, inging proposes an insistent practice of unscripted nonstop speaking as performance, where I’m in direct relation to the audience at the moment of articulation. It attempts to speak every thought at the moment I think it. For me, it is a practice of being porous to multiple things all at once, and accepting the form that approximates those ongoing perceptions. It’s a practice of presence, and of being present. It attempts to undo what I “know” about performing. inging is a choreography of the mind, and a means of navigating choreographic thinking, and attempts to expose that thinking, my thinking through the very fallible stuttering of language, and the emergence of and the inevitable context of the body as the “being in” of thought: how the irrational sweep of an arm will make me think of the smell of toast, that will trigger the memory of my mother driving in a powder blue buick, how the corner of the space makes me feel the sensation of disappearance, how then I can perceive the floor underneath me cracking open, that makes me think of Michael Jackson.
inging American Realness 2013. Credit: Ian Douglas
Are you primarily a solo artist?
No, but a lot of people consider me a solo artist. It may be because I’ve done a lot of solos, and I have never called myself a “company.” But I have done and continue to do many group works and have worked on and off with a core group of people for 15 years. I think a lot of my work deals with interior worlds, psychology and behaviors. I do believe that making work is a solitary, sometimes devastatingly lonely endeavor and maybe that comes out in the work, even if I’m working with 15 people. I like solos. I’m interested in self as content, in portraiture. Like a writer who writes fiction but it all comes from personal experience.
out of the kennel into a home, Dance Theater Workshop, NYC. 2005. Andrea Johnston and Keith Reddin. Credit: Jason Akira Somma
Tell us about your recent commission at The Wooden Floor with 50 young dancers.
One word is incredible. Really. Just incredible. I have so much to say about The Wooden Floor. The whole thing. The kids. The organization. The artistic director Melanie Rios Glaser. Talk about wearing many hats! That woman is super human! Plus her commitment to these kids and to dance in general is really inspiring. All the mentors. The production director Ben Tusher. My rehearsal assistant Jenn Bassage Bonfil. I actually had a rehearsal assistant!! It took me a while to figure out how to work with her since I’m so used to doing everything myself. But she was amazing, in every way, and we could never have accomplished what we did without her. I had been hearing about The Wooden Floor for years through colleagues who had been invited to make work with them – Susan Rethorst, Chris Yon, Karinne Keithley – and all of them always said how transforming the experience was, and now having done it myself, I can definitely say the same. And Melanie had been asking me for a while before I could coordinate my schedule. Basically the organization serves under privileged youth, low-income, disenfranchised youth through this after school dance program but it’s more holistic than that because they also provide tutoring, and counseling both for the child and the parents, and mentoring. The staff is pretty extensive. It’s basically a second home for these kids – sometimes a primary home. But one of the amazing things is that Melanie curates top notch contemporary choreographers to make work on, with and for these kids. Her perspective is that if they are given the best, and treated with respect and given agency and responsibility, and put under conditions where that is expected of them, then they will rise. So Melanie’s whole M.O. is that she curates choreographers who will collaborate with the kids and make them an essential part of the process, building their creative thinking, problem-solving and collaborative skills. I was really apprehensive at first because I had never worked with anyone younger than college –aged students but I decided I wanted to challenge myself so I asked Melanie to gather a group with a wide age range. I ended up working with 36 kids, ranging from 8 to 18 years old. There was very little movement that the kids themselves didn’t generate. I started with a nonstop moving practice and kind of went from there. It was stressful and a lot to navigate but it also was mysterious how it unfolded and came together. And to me that is the best – when I have no idea how things are happening and working but they are. The amount of determination, drive, and power in these kids is inspiring. And I think because most of them start the program from a young age, their ability to expose themselves, be vulnerable, and just try things was pretty impressive. Also, I had the idea that I wanted to work with a DJ but didn’t know anybody in the LA area and was connected to this amazing composer/musician/producer Alejandro Cohen who ended up playing live onstage. Our collaboration was really fluid, very easy, very exciting. I just lucked out all the way around with that gig!
What is your relationship with Motion Bank? For dancers unfamiliar with Motion Bank, can you describe the project….
Motion Bank is a project of The Forsythe Company and started I think with Bill’s Synchronous Objects interactive online tool. Essentially, it started as a way to research choreographic thinking and choreographic practice but it was also developed as an educational tool. I believe there were several phases to it and I was part of the four year phase that included and developed online digital scores of choreographers who were invited by Bill Forsythe to participate. Deborah Hay was the first choreographer who he invited and I’d been working on and off with Deborah since 2005. She’d asked me, along with Ros Warby and Juliette Mapp, to be a part of the project. That was from 2011-2013, although I started working on it in 2010, I think. It involved me adapting one of Deborah Hay’s solos, No Time to Fly, and then Deborah created a trio As Holy Sites Go based on Ros, Juliette and my adaptations. There were live performances of the solos and trio, in Frankfurt, and then the Motion Bank team also collected data and interviewed each of us in relation to Deborah’s scoring practice and her work with the nature of perception and performance. We were also filmed by the crew and much of that footage was included in the online website which is a very comprehensive interactive tool, breaking down Deborah’s creative practice. Within those years, I was also in Berlin a lot so I was working as consultant to the Motion Bank on Deborah’s work and was also invited to teach workshops based on Deborah’s work and choreographic scoring. It’s an amazing project – not just the part involving Deborah but the whole concept. It’s so well thought out and so well executed, dealing directly with issues of archive and how the archive can be a living, mutable, changeable and interactive tool rather than something that is indelible and fixed. It also looks at how choreographic thinking can be extended to and useful in other areas of research such as cognitive science, psychology, philosophy and the creative arts. The mastery and skill of the team but also the enormous curiosity of the digital artists and programmers working on the website was really outstanding. I’m so glad I was a part of it.
The role of teaching in your career:
Teaching has become an essential aspect of my artistic practice. I really don’t see it as separate anymore. There was a point when I realized I could teach what I practice rather than teaching forms and ideas that aren’t relevant to me anymore. Of course, some people want that, and some people don’t and I have learned to be okay with that too. I’ve realized my work is much more suited for workshops or labs or a daily practice where I don’t have to continually establish a way of thinking about working but can just work. Most of the time, it’s a psychology and a way of stripping down the expectations of what people just assume constitutes dance training, or dance making, and the forms and structures that takes on. For me, it becomes about reading the room, and balancing my interests with what I perceive people need to drop in or get beyond. And it’s about establishing a philosophy and bringing that into conscious practice.
Three questions for young choreographers to consider:
What is at stake for you?
Are you willing to face yourself day after day in the studio and not know what’s happening, or where you are going?
Can you accept that the meaning of your effort will not always be self-evident?
From inging, Frascati WG, Amsterdam, 2010.
Last performance you saw that really inspired you:
It’s an interesting question these days. I really believe that being inspired is a practice and takes work, that it doesn’t just happen, or is given to me, and I really take that on as an audience member – to meet the performance on its own terms. I’m usually inspired by anything or anyone who is purely generous, purely committed, where I feel something is at stake for them, when someone is “all in,” when I’m not treated like an idiot, where an aspect of humanity – whether that’s terrifying or joyful – is revealed to me, not because the choreographer or performer want me to see it, or is forcing it on me, but because it emerges as a result of truly being fully inside something. That usually has nothing to do with being “smart” or witty or ironic. The question reminds me of a Chuck Close quote I recently saw, something like: Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just get to work.
What keeps you believing and passionate about modern dance in 2015?
I really believe that dance (and especially those experimenting with the form and not just repeating the form) is the one medium that continues to complicate our normative understandings of who we are. In a time where everything seems to be about the bottom line, and about justifying the value and meaning of something through that lens, dance continues to puncture and cleave into those value systems. “What is this?” “What are they doing?” “Why are they doing that?” “What purpose does it have?” “I don’t understand it.” I think those are relevant questions, especially when they are not met with easy, or even any, answers. Those questions lead to other questions and pretty soon, if we have the patience, we are in a self-reflexive relationship to, and engaging in a metaphysical mediation on, our lives. I think there is hope and potential in that process. Sometimes I (half) jokingly say in class that this is not a training for dance but a training for the apocalypse. People usually look at me kind of funny and laugh uncomfortably but they seem to know: it’s a kind of extreme metaphor for acknowledging that when the systems of industry break down, and people find themselves unable to produce anything anymore with and through their bodies, or through community problem-solving, or through creative thinking, or don’t feel comfortable touching another sweaty/active body, or have the physical and perceptual ability to be responsive and adaptive to their quickly changing environment, dancers will be the one community that will thrive, and other people will depend on.
The role of technology in your dance life (reading about dance, sharing details about your work, marketing, etc):
I have a really really contentious relationship to technology, in general, and even more so when it comes to marketing myself, or my work. I find it so distasteful, and yet I’m so admiring of those artists who have integrated it into their lives and work. I think I’m the one person who is not on social media. I don’t have a Facebook, or Twitter account. It’s my worst nightmare that some person from high school or something will want to follow or friend me. I went onto LinkedIn because my mother invited me and I never use it. I like Instagram and follow people from around the world. I get a sense through these choreographed images what a culture is like in other places. I like that. When people say, oh I’ll just find you on Facebook and then I tell them I don’t have an account, they are pretty shocked. One friend joked that I was like a club that everyone talks about and wants to go to but there’s no address and no sign, and you have to know someone else that knows how to get in. Having said that though, you know, I have this show coming up and I do feel the pressure to get onto Facebook in a way that just never occurred to me before.
On the other side, for sure, I definitely use the internet all the time, reading about dance, blogs, reviews. It’s just a great research tool in general. But it can also be a major time suck of great proportion.
Final advice to young dancers:
Empathy, generosity, openness are not mutually exclusive to criticality or situating oneself, artistically. I would say that honing your listening and observation skills is crucial and definitely more important than making assumptions about things or thinking you know what camp you’re in. Cliques are dangerous things. They unnecessarily divide people and create elitism. Again, this has nothing to do with having opinions and aesthetic preferences. It’s important to constantly pull the rug out from underneath your own belief and value systems. Meet people and talk to them rather than silently judging them. They may surprise you. Go see everything – not just dance. And if you can’t afford it – find another way. Try to travel and experience other cultures and try to understand the history of their art making, and why artists are making the work they are making now rather than just dismissing it as this kind of work, or that kind of work. Inform yourself. Knowledge is key. Be interested and curious. Go to class, meet people. Watch people. Ask yourself why you like or dislike what you see and don’t stop there. Develop a writing practice right away. A journal, or what ever. What is important to you? What do you see? What are your observations? Develop a language that can articulate what you do. Don’t be afraid of words. They are just tools. Alternately words and concepts are not the thing, and they are just approximations. Learn to know who and when to ask for help. Don’t be afraid, or if you are afraid, don’t let that stop you. Find your power, not your aggression. I believe that making art is an act of generosity, of giving and is a service. Understand for yourself why you are doing what you are doing and don’t just make assumptions about it. Passion and desire are only part of the equation.
Participate!
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