KNOWING THE WILL - Jennifer Monson
London Skinner Releasing Easter School 2006
Week Three Afternoon Intensive


This workshop will be comprised of Improvisational Landscapes (improvisation) and Improvisational Research (improvisation in performance) sessions:

Improvisational landscapes
"Migration is specialized behavior especially evolved for the displacement of the individual in space." - Hugh Dingle, Entomologist

This could easily be a definition of dancing. This workshop will draw on Monson’s experience of dancing out side in her migratory project BIRD BRAIN. We will begin with a heightening of our own sensory perceptions of sight, sound, smell and touch. This will include exercises that cultivate our ability to localize sounds, sensitize our responses to light and our perception of shape, touch and direction. Once our perceptions are tuned we will integrate Skinner Releasing based image work. This will allow our dancing to evolve through the interplay of our experience of inner and outer landscapes.

Improvisational research
We will research our individual approaches to improvisation as a performance form. We will isolate various improvisational activities such as making transitions, creating locations, and sustaining energetic states, and other compositional strategies to bring a deeper understanding to our own personal and intrinsic improvisational logic. We will create scores that access our deeper layers of consciousness and challenge our assumptions about how we dance- uncovering both raw sophisticated compositional patterns. I am curious about how meanings get affixed to particular moments in performance both willfully and not and in our agency to reclaim and reenergize meanings and mistakes in the act of performance. We will dance for each other a lot.

Jennifer Monson is an improvisational practitioner and choreographer. She is dedicated to the art of performance as an improvisational form. She has created a wide body of work that incorporates well-developed collaborative relationships with many artists including Zeena Parkins, Yvonne Meier, David Zambrano, and DD Dorvillier. Recently she has used the concept of navigation as a way of informing her work and in the past four years has completed three migratory dance tours that followed the journeys of Gray Whales, Ospreys and Ducks and Geese. Dancing outside has deeply affected her practice. She teaches to a wide range of communities both globally and locally. She is currently working on iLAND – Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance that will be a sustainable artist in residence facility for artists, environmentalists, scientists and urban designers in Brooklyn.

Monson has received several awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003), a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Fellowship (1998), the National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer’s Fellowship (1989, 1992, 1993-95, 1995-97), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship (1989,1998). In 1997, she was awarded a New York Dance and Performance Award (“BESSIE”) for Sender and for sustained achievement in the dance field.

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