Topaz Arts presents an Open Rehearsal with John Jasperse

Next up in TOPAZ ARTS’ Series: Choreographers in the Studio

photo: © 2014 Yi-Chun Wu

Topaz Arts is pleased to host an Open Rehearsal with John Jasperse

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 at 7pm
TOPAZ ARTS
55-03 39th Avenue, Woodside, NY > directions
Admission is free > rsvp by email
or > rsvp on facebook

TOPAZ ARTS is pleased to present a new series Choreographers in the Studio featuring dance artists in a showing of works-in-progress. At the open rehearsal, acclaimed choreographer John Jasperse will be working with six dancers on the development of his new work, Remains, which will premiere July 5-7, 2016 at American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Remains will make its New York premiere at BAM’s Next Wave Festival September 21-24, 2016. Get a glimpse of the new work  before it premieres!

Remains (working title) is an evening-length work by choreographer John Jasperse in collaboration with performers Maggie Cloud, Marc Crousillat, Burr Johnson, Heather Lang, Stuart Singer and Claire Westby and composer John King, Video Designer Jeff Larson, and Lighting Designer Lenore Doxsee. The project marks the first collaboration between Jasperse, King and Larson. The work features six dancers, video projection and a score composed for electric guitar, viola and electronics.

Remains is a rumination on our existence in time. It explores how the remnants from our actions that remain in our wake create a context for the future. We’re looking at legacy, not as way of preserving our egos beyond the limits of death, but as the sum total of the context that results from our actions and that we hand on to the future. And we’re trying to acknowledge how our experiences and perspectives in the present are informed in part, wittingly or not, by remnants that emanate from the past. As we move back and forth along the axis of time, we are also playing with the notion that time is not just linear but is articulated through multiple dimensions. As there are a multiplicity of histories that populate the axis of time, we are trying to acknowledge that the terms “past” and “future” do not mean anything without first asking the question of whose past and whose future. By referencing how the body has been thought about in some select histories of art and dance, we are attempting to acknowledge some of where we have come from. From there, we are playing with what our “doing” in the present does–how it changes that context to (re)build a new context–in an effort to build a wake for the future from our actions in the present that allows for the possibility of hope.

About the Artist:
John Jasperse is a dance artist working in New York City since 1985. Jasperse has created sixteen evening-length works for John Jasperse Projects, as well as several commissioned works for other companies including White Oak’s Dance Project; Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, Israel; Lyon Opéra Ballet in France; and two co-productions with Ballett Frankfurt and the Forsythe Company in Frankfurt, Germany. His work has been presented internationally in 24 US cities and 29 countries across the globe, at festivals and venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater; Dance Theater Workshop; Danspace Project; The Joyce Theater; The Kitchen; Performance Space 122; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Chicago, IL; On the Boards, Seattle, WA; Philadelphia Live Arts, PA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Festival Montpellier Danse, France; Dance Umbrella, London, UK; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany; Yokohama Dance Collection, Japan; and Santiago a Mil, Chile, among many others.

Jasperse’s work has received several prestigious awards and fellowships including, most recently, a 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award and a 2014 New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Award for Within between in the category of Outstanding Production. In 2001, Jasperse received his first Bessie Award recognition of his body of choreographic work. He also received a US Artists Brooks-Hopkins Fellowship in 2011 as well as multiple fellowships over the years from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Tides Foundation’s Lambent Fellowship in the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. John Jasperse Projects has been supported by grants from many institutional donors, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Arts International, Creative Capital Foundation, Dance Magazine Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Jerome Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Meet the Composer, Multi-Arts Production Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts’s National Dance Project, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and Trust for Mutual Understanding.  Jasperse is co-founder of CPR – Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, NY.

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