The UC Davis Department of Theatre & Dance presents two new choreographies by graduating MFA candidates.Award-winning choreographer Jess Curtis delivers a section from Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies, created in collaboration with an international team of multidisciplinary performers.Nina Galin’s Jointedness is a dance-theatre-music work that explores different senses of “joint”: a point of clear articulation; a meeting place; a collaboration.  This MFA choreography double bill opens on February 12 and continues February 13 and 19-21 at Vanderhoef Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

Department of Theatre & Dance Chair David Grenke considers Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies (excerpt) and Jointedness to represent the heart of the department’s curriculum. “As mid-career professionals, Jess and Nina bring vast experience that becomes the catalyst for artistic questions. We value their new interdisciplinary works based on the nature of the questions that they prompt.”

The questions in Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies  probe the role(s) of imagined societal ideals as a kind of “fictional body” that disables individuals in terms of their ability to see others, and be seen, as beautiful, empowered, and autonomous.

Choreographer Jess Curtis explains, “Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies examines difference as a virtue in and of itself, finding the unique beauty in the idiosyncrasy of each individual performer. The synergistic and aesthetic necessity of difference is highlighted, and thus proposes that the audience re-consider their own definitions and limitations of beauty and empowerment.”

For this new work excerpt Curtis has gathered an all-star collaborative team from six countries including dramaturge/provocateur Guillermo Gomez-Peña (San Francisco/Mexico), and performers Maria Francesca Scaroni (Berlin/Italy), Claire Cunningham (Glasgow), David Toole (UK), and Jörg Müller (France).

The complete Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies by Jess Curtis and his interdisciplinary dance performance company, Gravity, is commissioned by, and set to premiere at, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2011.

Nina Galin’s Jointedness is a triptych of two solos plus one quartet. Each of these three segments pursues a dream of full presence in the moment of exchange between performers and audience. They explore sustained moments of aesthetic articulation among movement, singing, spoken text, visual design and philosophy. Over the course of the three sections, viewers will see 23 chairs, a swinging 50-foot extension cord, elegant costumes and a suspended swath of cargo netting. Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be:” soliloquy (Hamlet) offers a launching point for segments I and III. Segment II creates a bodymind dialogue between Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and American Public Media’s Marketplace.

“Jointedness” refers to Galin’s interest in both literal and metaphorical joints, “I’m playing with the notion of a joint as a point of clear articulation where two things meet and interact — bones, ideas, images, texts, artistic disciplines. Jointedness delves more deeply into concepts at the heart of my recent work, Each/Other, which was performed in a working Starbucks store in southern California.”

Galin, her dancers and a trio of alternative-jazz musicians transformed the coffee shop from a site of “to-go” culture into a polyrhythmic utopia. The innovative dance-theatre-music work addressed the complex “jointedness” between personal autonomy and collectivity within Starbuck’s culture of corporate mass-production and consumption.

In Jointedness, Nina and her performers, MFA candidate James Marchbanks and undergraduates Joshua Harrelson, Andrea Kubisch and Maggie Steinmann, will similarly transform Vanderhoef Studio Theatre into another haunting, yet playful, world of piercing queries.

Three more UC Davis MFA candidates are part of the production: Josh Steadman is Scenic Designer, Jake Nelson is Lighting Designer, and E. “Kaino” Hopper is Costume Designer. Kaino calls herself a “costume listener” for these edgy pieces that require non-traditional dance garb.

Rounding out the concept artist team are Composers Mark Growden (Jointedness) and Matthias Herrmann (Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies). Growden is a singer/songwriter whose credits include two live albums and several film soundtracks. Herrmann’s credits include numerous award-winning scores for international dance theatre companies. The Stage Manager is undergraduate Rosamund Grimshaw, an International Exchange Student from the University of Glasgow and co-artistic director of Glasgow’s Flatrate Theatre Company.

Biographies

Jess Curtis, living and working in both San Francisco and Berlin, has created a body of work ranging from the underground extremes of Mission District warehouses with Contraband and CORE (1985-1998) to the formal refinement and exuberance of European State Theatres and Circus Tents with Compagnie Cahin-Caha and Jess Curtis/Gravity (1998-present). Curtis has collaborated with the renowned fabrikCompanie in Potsdam, Germany to create the award-winning fallen, and has been commissioned to create works for companies such as Artblau in Germany, ContactArt in Italy, Blue Eyed Soul Dance Company in the UK, and Croi Glan Integrated Dance in Ireland. Curtis has twice been recognized by the James Irvine Foundation/ Dance USA California Dance Initiatives, having been awarded a California Dancemakers Fellowship (2001) and a Dance: Creation to Performance Award (2005). He also teaches Dance, Contact Improv and Interdisciplinary Performance throughout the US and Europe, and has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, and the University of the Arts in Berlin. He is currently pursuing an MFA in choreography at UC Davis.

Jess Curtis/Gravity was founded in 2000 as a research and development vehicle for very live performance. Gravity aspires to the creation of exceptionally engaging body based art that explores and addresses issues and ideas of substance and relevance to a broad popular public. In addition to the creation of live performances Gravity also produces and facilitates educational experiences for both professionals and lay people in movement and performing arts.

Nina Galin is a dance-theatre artist, somatic educator and bodymind philosopher. She is interested in the notion of “categories,” perhaps because she can’t seem to fit into one. She generates and disseminates her interdisciplinary work using movement, talking, singing, touch, writing, breathing and listening. From 1991-2002 she was based in San Francisco, directing her company, Nina Galin Music & Dance, and maintaining a private bodywork practice based in Alexander Technique, Pilates, connective tissue massage and other modalities. During this time she also performed in the work of other artists including Deborah Slater, Ney Fonseca, Ellie Herman, Tracy Rhodes and A Travelling Jewish Theatre.  She is the recipient of prestigious awards including the San Francisco Arts Commission Special Projects Grant and Hitachi America’s Community Action Committee Grant.

This production may contain full or partial nudity. Viewer discretion is advised.

 What: Double Bill of Dances for Non-Fictional Bodies (excerpt) choreographed by Jess Curtis and Jointedness choreographed by Nina Galin.

Where: Vanderhoef Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts
When : Fri-Sat, Feb 12-13 & 19-20, 8pm; Sun, Feb 21, 2pm 

Tickets: $16/18 General; $11/13 Student/Child/Senior