Jennifer Monson, Artistic director, choreographer and performer, iLAND

Jennifer Monson is a choreographer, performer, and teacher. Since 1983, she has explored strategies in choreography, improvisation, and collaboration in experimental dance. In 2000, her work took a new turn to investigate the relationship between movement and environment. This ongoing research has led her into inquiries of cultural and scientific understandings of large-scale phenomenon such as animal navigation and migration, geological formations such as aquifers, and re-functioned sites such as the abandoned Ridgewood Reservoir. These studies provide the means to unearth and inquire into choreographic and embodied ways of knowing and re-imagining our relationship to the environments and spaces humans/all beings inhabit. Her projects BIRD BRAIN (2000-2005), iMAP/Ridgewood Reservoir (2007), and the Mahomet Aquifer Project (2008-2010), SIP (sustained immersive process)/watershed are investigations that have radically reframed the role dance plays in our cultural understandings of nature and wilderness. Her current work Live Dancing Archive proposes that choreography itself is an archival practice for environmental phenomena. Her early choreography has been performed in a diverse array of New York City venues including: The Kitchen, Performance Space 122, and Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church; as well as other recognized national and international venues. She has collaborated with Zeena Parkins, DD Dorvillier, Yvonne Meier, David Zambrano, and other interdisciplinary artists. Her multi-year project BIRD BRAIN received funding from MAP Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts BUILD grant, Creative Capital Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Jerome Foundation, New England LEF Foundation, Altria Group, Inc., National Dance Project, National Performance Network, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has received fellowships from the NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Lambent Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. She has received two Bessie awards- one for sustained achievement in the field and one for BIRD BRAIN.

In 2004, Jennifer Monson incorporated under the name iLAND- Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance. iLAND explores the power of dance in collaboration with other fields to illuminate a kinetic understanding of the world. This dance research organization upholds a fundamental commitment to environmental sustainability as it relates to art and the urban context, and cultivates cross-disciplinary research among the arts, environmental science, urban design, and other related fields. In addition to serving as Artistic Director of iLAND, Monson is currently a Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as part of a new initiative of the Environmental Council. Monson is also a Professor at Large at the University of Vermont, a six-year term in collaboration with the dance, environmental studies, and library departments.

Fallow Time

May 27, 2014 by

Movement Research Spring Festival in Collaboration with iLAND

Tuesday May 27 – Monday June 2

fallow time was curated by Elliott Maltby, Jennifer Monson, Aisha Ohs, and Tatyana Tenenbaum in partnership with the Movement Research Spring Festival. iLAND Symposium events included a workshop and performance with Through Earth, Through Body, Through Speech at Flushing Meadows Park and the Queens Museum and Sensing to Know/Analyzing to Imagine: a talk and walk exploring the dual perspective of the artist-scientist with artist scientists Amy Berkow, Kathleen McCarthy, Jason Munshi-South and Hara Wolz. The symposium also included two days of fallow time at Floyd Bennett Field, Gateway National Recreation area camping site.

For more information check out the Fallow Time Brochure or the Movement Research website.

Curatorial Statement

A fallow field is one that is plowed – it is prepared but then left open. fallow time is a festival that invites emptiness or the unanticipated. The festival is prepared space and time for open action, or inaction, to take place. It creates a platform for participation, intergenerational meetings and intersectionality to support all bodies in their creative potential. We are providing time for concrete and insubstantial ideas to be tested, to take hold and grow…or fail. fallow time is a time of rest, where unexpected actions and materials make contact and allow for new forms and systems to flourish: a chance for us to be together that is not dictated by any need to produce. The festival examines both urban ecologies and artistic production in our society. Inviting the multiple meanings of sustainability to rub against a range of creative practices, we will enact scenarios for thriving in our increasingly unpredictable environment. fallow time allows us to ground ourselves and to recuperate the values that are so central to dance: the values of the body to listen, feed, touch, see, taste, deliver, heal, digest, produce, die.

Overview

Tuesday May 27 – 11-6pm – Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the Queens Museum – Free

Through Earth, Through Body, Through Speech Join Fantastic Futures and Jason Munshi-South for the workshop and per formance listed below, a continuation of their summer 2013 iLAB residency in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and Willets Point. The collaboration uses a cross-pollination of ar tistic practice and scientific method to engage the local community in a conversation around personal and family histories of the park and their visions of the park’s future.

Workshop – 11am-3pm

Meet at the north end of the Unisphere. Rain or Shine.

A movement and mapping exercise based on Munshi-South’s study of white-footed mice, “Urban landscape genetics: canopy cover predicts gene flow between white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus) populations in New York City.”

A light informal lunch will be provided. Activities are appropriate for all ages.

Performance – 4-6pm

In the Queens Museum of Art A multi-channel sound installation and per formance that represents the scientific concept of an urban to rural gradient. Field recordings of the park are layered with interviews in which visitors are asked to express their memories and hopes for the park, and with a spoken narrative from a mouse’s perspective based on urban landscape genetics. participants in both workshop and performance: Fantastic Futures (Julio Hernandez, Huong Ngo, Phuong Nguyen, Solgil Oh, Sable Elyse, Or Zubalsky) and Jason Munshi-South.

For additional information for Tuesday’s events, email info@ilandart.org or call 917-860-8239.

Moving into the Out There

April 4, 2012 by

Presenters and participants included New School professors Ivan Raykoff, Philip Silva, Danielle Goldman, Neil Greenberg, Victoria Marshall, and Robert Sember; PARK collaborators Kathy Westwater, Seung Jae Lee and Jennifer Scappetonne; iLAND board members Elliott Maltby, Kate Cahill, Carolyn Hall and Julia Handschuh, Jennifer Monson; choreographer and improviser Susan Sgorbati, social scientist at the U.S. Forest Service, Erika Svendson; artist Kyle deCamp. Performance created by Athena Kokoronis. Workshops by E.J. McAdams; Liz Barry, Jessica Einhorn and Lailye Weidman of Higher E.D.; and Clarinda Mac Low of River to Creek.

Overview

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.