This preview has been provided by the American Dance Festival.
John Jasperse Projects
ADF will present the North Carolina premiere of Within between, an evening-length ADF-commissioned work by groundbreaking choreographer John Jasperse created in collaboration with the performers, including an original commissioned score by composer Jonathan Bepler and lighting design by Lenore Doxsee.
Everything looks like something. But apparently you can’t judge a book by its cover. Despite the interplay and disjunction between essence and appearance, all artistic work uses its perceptual surface (what it looks like, sounds like, feels like…) as a means of transmission. The aesthetics of a work of art speak to the value systems of its author(s), which are in turn formed through the construction of such eternally slippery terms as beauty. In Within between Jasperse seeks both to embrace and to resist the habits of his own history, to create a cross-pollination or catalytic mating of sensibilities, where the work emerges out of the space between what seems to be distinct terrains.
Mature audiences recommended due to language.
About John Jasperse
John Jasperse is a dance artist living and working in New York City since graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1985. In 1989, he established John Jasperse Company, later re-named John Jasperse Projects in 2012 to better reflect the nature of the organization’s ongoing work as a project-based production structure. In 1996, Jasperse created Thin Man Dance, Inc., a New York-based not-for-profit organization; this structure supports the work of John Jasperse Projects.
John Jasperse’s work has been presented by festivals and presenting organizations in the U.S. including The American Dance Festival, Durham, NC; Diverseworks, Houston, TX; The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Burlington, VT; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Chicago, IL; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; Philadelphia Live Arts, PA; Summer Stages, Concord, MA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and internationally in Brazil, Chile, Israel, Japan, and throughout Europe including La Biennale di Venezia; Cannes International Dance Festival; Dance Umbrella, London; EuroKaz, Zagreb; Kampnagel, Hamburg; Montpellier Danse, Tanz im August, Berlin; TanzQuartier Wein, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt; and the VEO Festival, Valencia. In New York, the Company has been presented at numerous venues including The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, The Joyce Theater, The Kitchen, and Performance Space 122.
Jasperse has created for the company several shorter works, and fifteen evening-length works: Fort Blossom revisited (2000/2012), Canyon (2011), Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies (2009), Misuse liable to prosecution (2007), Becky, Jodi, and John (2007), Prone (2005), CALIFORNIA (2003), just two dancers (2003), Giant Empty (2001), Madison as I imagine it (1999), Waving to you from here (1997), Excessories (1995), furnished/unfurnished (1993), Eyes Half Closed (1991), and Rickety Perch (1989), as well as various projects in collaboration with other artists. Shorter works include PURE (2008), Fort Blossom (2000), and Scrawl (1999).
Under the umbrella of the John Jasperse Projects/Thin Man Dance, Inc., Jasperse has created several works for other companies: See Through Knot, commissioned by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for White Oak’s Dance Project (2000); The Rest, commissioned by the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, Israel (2000); à double face for the Lyon Opéra Ballet, France (March 2002); missed FIT for The Irish Modern Dance Theater, Dublin, Ireland (October 2002); Highline, as a part of the Montana Suite Project for Headwaters Dance Company, Missoula, MT (2007); and most recently Spurts of Activity Before the Emptiness of Late Afternoon for Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Salt Lake City, UT (2010).
Jasperse’s work has received several prestigious awards both in the United States and abroad, including a New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Award in 2001 in recognition of his body of choreographic work, the 1999 Scripps/ADF Primus-Tamaris Fellowship, the Doris Duke Award (1998), the 1997 Mouson Award by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, Germany; three prizes in the 1996 Rencontres Internationales Chorégraphiques de Bagnolet; and the Choreography Prize at the 3rd Suzanne Dellal International Dance Competition (1996) in Tel Aviv, Israel for Excessories.
Jasperse is a 2011 US Artists Brooks Hopkins Fellow and has received fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2003), the Tides Foundation’s Lambent Fellowship in the Arts (2004-2007), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1998), the National Endowment for the Arts (1992, 1994, 1995-96) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1988, 1994, 2000 and 2010). In addition to numerous commissions for new works, Jasperse’ work and the Company have also been supported by grants from Altria Group, Inc., American Music Center Live Music for Dance Program, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Arts International, Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, Dance Magazine Foundation, Fonds d’Aide à la Production Chorégraphique du Conseil Général de Seine-Saint-Denis (France), Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Greenwall Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Heathcote Art Foundation, Jerome Foundation, James E. Robison Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Meet the Composer, the Multi-Arts Production Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts BUILD program, New York State Council on the Arts, the Lila Acheson Wallace Theater Fund, established in The New York Community Trust by the founders of The Reader’s Digest Association, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
Since 1991, he has regularly taught workshops and classes in the U.S., Europe, Mexico, and Brazil. As a dancer/performer, he began his career working with Lisa Kraus and Dancers (1985-1987), creating original roles in four works, and performing in the US and Europe. In 1988 and 1989, he worked in Belgium with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas, performing in Ottone, Ottone in major festivals and venues through Europe. From 1987 to 1993, he worked with Jennifer Monson, both performing in her work and collaborating on improvisation projects.
Jasperse is a co-founder of CPR – Center for Performance Research, Inc. Through subsidized rehearsal rentals, residencies, performances and other public fora, CPR supports research and development in dance, performance and allied fields. CPR is located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Links to articles
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/arts/dance/john-jasperses-fort-blossom-at-new-york-live-arts.html
http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2012/05/consider-the-body/