VANESSA JUSTICE DANCE
10,000 (2019)
Dancers: Vanessa Justice and Kelly Garone
Venue: “Dance on the Hudson” at Riverside Park South, New York City
Length: 18 minutes
Commissioned by Riverside Park Conservancy
Using the number 10,000 as a coincidental link between obscure facts in history, this dance assembles aspects of past and present to materialize an alternate portrayal of current anxieties, contradictions, and privileges in America. The work originated from the desire to process problems of the day through embodied, creative action--and to search for and acknowledge past conditions that have influenced where we are today.
Artist’s Note: I embrace that this Summer on the Hudson event occurs one day following the Global Climate Strike and one month before Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Sky Ambit (2018)
Choreographer and Dancer: Vanessa Justice
Venue: “Dance on the Hudson” at Riverside Park South, New York City
Commissioned by Riverside Park Conservancy
Sky Ambit is an improvised, site-specific dance that opens a dialogue between the performer’s rhythm of the breath, and the negative space within her and within the immediate environment. Conceived while witnessing the haze caused by recent wildfires, the dance honors the air and the sky. It is a study of the perception of space, the interoception of the breath, and the playful interaction between different pathways of sensory information.
Turning and Other Everyday Objects (2017)
Created as a kind of homage to the analytic, post-modern choreographers of the early 1970's, the piece explores subtle connections of the dancers’ physical architecture in relationship to gravity and space. (Dance historian, Sally Banes, describes the experimental dance emerging in New York City during the early 1970’s as “analytic post-modern dance,” with Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs as key artists in this movement. (Though this work was developed as an homage to these choreographers, it does not intend to imitate but simply embrace, deflect, and question the values displayed by them, while staying true to my own choreographic methods.)
Dancers:
Bates College Students
Venue:
Schaeffer Theater, Lewiston, Maine
Dancing the Edits: An Experiment in Perception
(a multi-channel video) (2014-15)
In this work, videoediting is approached as a particular mode of dance research, highlighting the dependency of one's "style of attention" on aesthetic choice. Produced during an Auntsforcamera Residency at New Museum, NYC.
Video Associate:
Rachel Boggia
Performers:
Lily Ockwell and Kendra Portier.
Music Contribution:
Kerri Lowe
Installed:
Trouw, Amsterdam (2014)
New Museum, NYC (2014-15)
Vanessa explores post-production as a choreography. She captured footage of dancers dancing in the wilds of NYC, which she then projects onto a variety of monitors in a makeshift production studio in the New Museum Theater. She then uses a small handheld camera to dance an in-camera edit of those projections. The in-camera edit is the primary focus of the work. As part of this process, she is exploring in-camera editing through different somatic states and scores.
Vanessa explores post-production as a choreography. She captured footage of dancers dancing in the wilds of NYC, which she then projects onto a variety of monitors in a makeshift production studio in the New Museum Theater. She then uses a small handheld camera to dance an in-camera edit of those projections. The in-camera edit is the primary focus of the work. As part of this process, she is exploring in-camera editing through different somatic states and scores.
The Relational Body Project: Installation 4 (2015)
Commissioned by Long Island University, Brooklyn
Venue:
Kumble Theater, 2015
Dancers:
Long Island University Dance Majors (Sasha Bowman, Aja Carthon, Elizabeth Juarez, Janeysi Morel, Timothy Muniz, David Myrie)
Music:
"Take It to the Max" by Dan Deacon, “Edge of Seventeen" by Stevie Nicks
Lighting: Tim Cryan
The Relational Body Project: Installation 3 (2015)
The Relational Body Project absorbs conversations overheard in NYC (primarily on the subway) and transforms them into songs and dances that are then set within the pedestrian spaces of the city. The intent? To create a connection to "otherness," to energize public spaces, to contemplate our contemporary condition through a myriad of overheard conversations, to embrace difference, to transform fleeting soundbites into art, to witness others as important, to nurture the relational body.
Dancers:
Jasmine Hearn, Marion Spencer, Vanessa Justice
Venue: Riverside Park South
Commissioned by Riverside Park Conservancy
The Relational Body Project: Installation 2 (2015)
The Relational Body Project absorbs conversations overheard in NYC (primarily on the subway) and transforms them into songs and dances that are then set within the pedestrian spaces of the city. The intent? To create a connection to "otherness," to energize public spaces, to contemplate our contemporary condition through a myriad of overheard conversations, to embrace difference, to transform fleeting soundbites into art, to witness others as important, to nurture the relational body.
Dancers:
Lily Ockwell and Kendra Portier
Venue:
The Highline, Chelsea Market, and outside The Whitney Museum,NYC
The Relational Body Project: Installation 1
(Studio Series at New York Live Arts) (2012)
For the Studio Series, Justice is inspired by vibration and the conductivity of the tissues of the body. She explores the everyday experience of sensory impressions combined with thoughts, emotions, and energy to collectively constitute the contents of consciousness. She sets up a framework for internal and external sources of movement to coexist, and explores the expressive potential of performance in close proximity to the audience.
The Relational Body Project absorbs conversations overheard in NYC (primarily on the subway) and transforms them into songs and dances that are then set within the pedestrian spaces of the city. The intent? To create a connection to "otherness," to energize public spaces, to contemplate our contemporary condition through a myriad of overheard conversations, to embrace difference, to transform fleeting soundbites into art, to witness others as important, to nurture the relational body.
Venue: New York Live Arts
May 4 and 5 2012
Performers: Talya Epstein, Lily Ockwell, Kendra Portier, Devika Wickremesinghe, and contemporary artist Janine Antoni.
Commissioned by the Studio Series at New York Live Arts
am big ambiguous (2010)
am big ambiguous explores the body in its being-ness as both subject and object—as the element central to our perception and experience, and as a radical ambiguity in the context of contemporary philosophy and culture.
Choreographer:
Vanessa Justice
Dancer: Vanessa Justice
Video design: Rachel Boggia and Vanessa Justice
Sound Design: Nick Patterson
Research included conversation with philosopher Richard Shusterman and the youtube home video "cha la la la la oh oh ooooh."
my copy world (2010)
This piece imagines the desire and struggle for human connection within a hyperreal world, as postulated by philosopher Baudrillard, that blends reality and representation, and where social behavior is perpetuated by being viewed and endlessly copied.
Commissioned by Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance
Dancers: Professional Repertory Company of SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance)
Music: Ingram Marshall, Lucky Dragons, Johnny Cash
Venue: The Republic (Salzburg, Austria)
(Later toured to Poland and Germany)
Expulsion (2010)
Vanessa contributes choreography and performance to Anita Glesta's new multi-channel video based on Masaccio's fresco, "The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden." Vanessa's expressive body, quietly moving in shadowy black-and-white, suggests the humanism and pathos of Masaccio's work.
Choreography/Performance:
Vanessa Justice
Venue:
FiveMyles Gallery, Brooklyn
FLATLAND (2009)
FLATLAND casts a surrealist tone with implications of anxiety and beauty. Inspired by Edmund Burke's On the Sublime (1756), this evocative, layered work creates an alluring tension while juxtaposing different forms and mediums (dance, film, animation). The dance hatches a dream-like world of precise and pulsating movement set against white-washed walls and featuring sound from David Lynch's 1977 movie Eraserhead. Made during a residency through the Joyce Theater Foundation, at Joyce SoHo.
Performed by:
Maggie Bennett, Kendra Portier & Alli Ruszkowski.
Original music and sound by: Nicholas Patterson.
Lighting design by:
Joe Levasseur.
Additional Sound:
David Lynch's film Eraserhead.
Video by:
Vanessa Justice with Rachel Boggia, Kareen Balsam & Hannah Carpenter.
Animation by:
Emily Wormley.
Costumes by:
Maira Santos Houck & Vanessa Justice.
Sculpture by:
Hans van Meeuwen
Venue: Joyce SoHo
Visitor (2008)
Set against the sound and flurry of a battalion of fans, this solo explores states of arrival and disappearance, evoking an eerie world at once quotidian and alien. The piece strips away layers of itself to finally reveal its own emptiness and the disappearance of the dancer from the dance. A manipulation of objects suggests a kind of puppetry, until the objects become inanimate—like the detritus left behind after a person passes away.
Performer:
Rachel Boggia
Music/Sound:
Robert Ashley, “She Was a Visitor”
Venue:
Wesleyan University Black Box Theater
This piece was commissioned and performed by Wesleyan University Dance Professor, Rachel Boggia.
Noise'sNoise (2008)
Winter coats, a whistling tea kettle...white noise, tree trunks, long wigs removed and replaced, negative sound and space...These elements form an atmospheric projection of absence (as the dark underbelly of presence?) where the emptiness that we fear finds expression. As six siren-like dancers harness and dispel energy, they hang in limbo between a glassy facade and vulnerable disclosure. A sound installation places the dancers and audience inside an aural environment of varying sound frequencies including Robert Ashley's whispered Automatic Writing and ballgame radio. The dance was guided by the question, "How might the dance evolve tone, subtext and form via movements of attention?"
Dancers:
Kendra Portier, Kristin Hapke, Maggie Bennett, Allison Ruszkowski, Yari Alcaraz.
Sound Installation:
Vanessa Justice
Music:
Robert Ashley, Alvin Curran
Commissioned by Dance New Amsterdam
2-Liter Alteration (2006)
The Mirth of Floating Sideways (2003)
SELECTED WORK BY VANESSA JUSTICE
dddPhoto: Yoav Cohen
10,000 (2019)
Dancers: Vanessa Justice and Kelly Garone
Venue: “Dance on the Hudson” at Riverside Park South, New York City
Length: 18 minutes
Commissioned by Riverside Park Conservancy
Using the number 10,000 as a coincidental link between obscure facts in history, this dance assembles aspects of past and present to materialize an alternate portrayal of current anxieties, contradictions, and privileges in America. The work originated from the desire to process problems of the day through embodied, creative action--and to search for and acknowledge past conditions that have influenced where we are today.
Artist’s Note: I embrace that this Summer on the Hudson event occurs one day following the Global Climate Strike and one month before Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Photo: Ian Douglassg 2
SKY AMBIT (2018)
Choreographer and Dancer: Vanessa Justice
Venue: “Dance on the Hudson” at Riverside Park South, New York City
Commissioned by Riverside Park Conservancy
Sky Ambit is an improvised, site-specific dance that opens a dialogue between the performer’s rhythm of the breath, and the negative space within her and within the immediate environment. Conceived while witnessing the extreme haze caused by recent wildfires, the dance honors the air and the sky. It is a study of the perception of space, the interoception of the breath, and the playful interaction between different pathways of sensory information.
TURNING AND OTHER EVERYDAY OBJECTS (2017)
Dancers:
Bates College Students
Venue:
Schaeffer Theater, Lewiston, Maine
Created as a kind of homage to the analytic, post-modern choreographers of the early 1970's, the piece explores subtle connections of the dancers’ physical architecture in relationship to gravity and space. (Dance historian, Sally Banes, describes the experimental dance emerging in New York City during the early 1970’s as “analytic post-modern dance,” with Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs as key artists in this movement. (Though this work was developed as an homage to these choreographers, it does not intend to imitate but simply embrace, deflect, and question the values displayed by them, while staying true to my own choreographic methods.)
Photo: Rachel Boggia d
DANCING THE EDITS: AN EXPERIMENT IN PERCEPTION
(A MULTI-CHANNEL VIDEO) (2014-15)
Choreographer/Film+Editing:
Vanessa Justice
Video Associate:
Rachel Boggia
Performers:
Lily Ockwell and Kendra Portier.
Music Contribution:
Kerri Lowe
Installed:
Trouw, Amsterdam (2014)
New Museum, NYC (2014-15)
In this work, videoediting is approached as a particular mode of dance research, highlighting the dependency of one's "style of attention" on aesthetic choice. Produced during an Auntsforcamera Residency at New Museum, NYC.
THE RELATIONAL BODY PROJECT: INSTALLATION 4 (2015)
Commissioned by Long Island University, Brooklyn
Venue:
Kumble Theater, 2015
Dancers:
Long Island University Dance Majors (Sasha Bowman, Aja Carthon, Elizabeth Juarez, Janeysi Morel, Timothy Muniz, David Myrie)
Music:
"Take It to the Max" by Dan Deacon, “Edge of Seventeen" by Stevie Nicks
Lighting: Tim Cryan
THE RELATIONAL BODY PROJECT: INSTALLATION 3 (2015)
Dancers:
Jasmine Hearn, Marion Spencer, Vanessa Justice
Venue: Riverside Park South
Commissioned by Riverside Park Conservancy
The Relational Body Project absorbs conversations overheard in NYC (primarily on the subway) and transforms them into songs and dances that are then set within the pedestrian spaces of the city. The intent? To create a connection to "otherness," to energize public spaces, to contemplate our contemporary condition through a myriad of overheard conversations, to embrace difference, to transform fleeting soundbites into art, to witness others as important, to nurture the relational body.
THE RELATIONAL BODY PROJECT: INSTALLATION 2 (2015)
Dancers:
Lily Ockwell and Kendra Portier
Venue:
The Highline, Chelsea Market, and outside The Whitney Museum, NYC
The Relational Body Project absorbs conversations overheard in NYC (primarily on the subway) and transforms them into songs and dances that are then set within the pedestrian spaces of the city. The intent? To create a connection to "otherness," to energize public spaces, to contemplate our contemporary condition through a myriad of overheard conversations, to embrace difference, to transform fleeting soundbites into art, to witness others as important, to nurture the relational body.
THE RELATIONAL BODY PROJECT:
INSTALLATION 1
(STUDIO SERIES AT NEW YORK LIVE ARTS) (2012)
Venue: New York Live Arts
May 4 and 5 2012
Performers: Talya Epstein, Lily Ockwell, Kendra Portier, Devika Wickremesinghe, and contemporary artist Janine Antoni.
Commissioned by the Studio Series at New York Live Arts
For the Studio Series, Justice is inspired by vibration and the conductivity of the tissues of the body. She explores the everyday experience of sensory impressions combined with thoughts, emotions, and energy to collectively constitute the contents of consciousness. She sets up a framework for internal and external sources of movement to coexist, and explores the expressive potential of performance in close proximity to the audience.
The Relational Body Project absorbs conversations overheard in NYC (primarily on the subway) and transforms them into songs and dances that are then set within the pedestrian spaces of the city. The intent? To create a connection to "otherness," to energize public spaces, to contemplate our contemporary condition through a myriad of overheard conversations, to embrace difference, to transform fleeting soundbites into art, to witness others as important, to nurture the relational body.
AM BIG AMBIGUOUS (2010)
Choreographer:
Vanessa Justice
Dancer: Vanessa Justice
Video design: Rachel Boggia and Vanessa Justice
Sound Design: Nick Patterson
Research included conversation with philosopher Richard Shusterman and the youtube home video "cha la la la la oh oh ooooh."
am big ambiguous explores the body in its being-ness as both subject and object—as the element central to our perception and experience, and as a radical ambiguity in the context of contemporary philosophy and culture.
my copy world (2010)
This piece imagines the desire and struggle for human connection within a hyperreal world, as postulated by philosopher Baudrillard, that blends reality and representation, and where social behavior is perpetuated by being viewed and endlessly copied.
Commissioned by Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance
Dancers: Professional Repertory Company of SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance)
Music: Ingram Marshall, Lucky Dragons, Johnny Cash
Venue: The Republic (Salzburg, Austria)
(Later toured to Poland and Germany)
EXPULSION (2010)
Choreography/Performance:
Vanessa Justice
Venue:
FiveMyles Gallery, Brooklyn
Vanessa contributes choreography and performance to Anita Glesta's new multi-channel video based on Masaccio's fresco, "The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden." Vanessa's expressive body, quietly moving in shadowy black-and-white, suggests the humanism and pathos of Masaccio's work.
Heading 2
Photo: Ian Douglass, Design: Jason Rylander
FLATLAND (2009)
Performed by:
Maggie Bennett, Kendra Portier & Alli Ruszkowski.
Original music and sound by:
Nicholas Patterson.
Lighting design by:
Joe Levasseur.
Additional Sound:
David Lynch's film Eraserhead.
Video by:
Vanessa Justice with Rachel Boggia, Kareen Balsam & Hannah Carpenter.
Animation by:
Emily Wormley.
Costumes by:
Maira Santos Houck & Vanessa Justice.
Sculpture by:
Hans van Meeuwen
Venue: Joyce SoHo
FLATLAND casts a surrealist tone with implications of anxiety and beauty. Inspired by Edmund Burke's On the Sublime (1756), this evocative, layered work creates an alluring tension while juxtaposing different forms and mediums (dance, film, animation). The dance hatches a dream-like world of precise and pulsating movement set against white-washed walls and featuring sound from David Lynch's 1977 movie Eraserhead. Made during a residency through the Joyce Theater Foundation, at Joyce SoHo.
VISITOR (2008)
Choreographer: Vanessa Justice
Performer:
Rachel Boggia
Music/Sound:
Robert Ashley, “She Was a Visitor”
Venue:
Wesleyan University Black Box Theater
This piece was commissioned and performed by Wesleyan University Dance Professor, Rachel Boggia.
Set against the sound and flurry of a battalion of fans, this solo explores states of arrival and disappearance, evoking an eerie world at once quotidian and alien. The piece strips away layers of itself to finally reveal its own emptiness and the disappearance of the dancer from the dance. A manipulation of objects suggests a kind of puppetry, until the objects become inanimate—like the detritus left behind after a person passes away.
NOISE'SNOISE
Dancers:
Kendra Portier, Kristin Hapke, Maggie Bennett, Allison Ruszkowski, Yari Alcaraz.
Choreography/Sound Installation:
Vanessa Justice
Wnter coats, a whistling tea kettle...white noise, tree trunks, long wigs removed and replaced, negative sound and space...These elements form an atmospheric projection of absence (as the dark underbelly of presence?) where the emptiness that we fear finds expression. As six siren-like dancers harness and dispel energy, they hang in limbo between a glassy facade and vulnerable disclosure. A sound installation places the dancers and audience inside an aural environment of varying sound frequencies including Robert Ashley's whispered Automatic Writing and ballgame radio. The dance was guided by the question, "How might the dance evolve tone, subtext and form via movements of attention?"
Photo: Paula Court, 2007
2-LITER ALTERATION (2006)
Choreography: Vanessa Justice
Dancers: Kendra Portier and Vanessa Justice
Performed at Kumble Theater, Long Island University, Brooklyn
The duet operates within a shifting context, and continuously alters elements of movement, costume, and set toward an experience of the passage of time. The piece considers cyclic and linear time, markers in time, diurnal time and routine, the movement of presence through time, catching up to 'lost time', and time already past. Photo: Paula Court, 2007
The duet evolved from several prior dances:
1) a solo, forlorn and haunting, set against a suspended two-liter bottle of red paint streaming upon a large canvas. The dance was inspired by human vulnerability and loss. Blending formalism and expressionism, it references Mary Wigman's "Witch Dance," and the jointedness/folding movements of Trisha Brown.
2) A series of studies aimed at healing my body and re-discovering my choreographic interests following a life-threatening trauma.
3) A solo composed to "Erbarme dich, mein Gott," Aria 39 of Bach's St. Matthew Passion.
THE MIRTH OF FLOATING SIDEWAYS (2003)
DD
Choreographer: Vanessa Justice
Dancers:
Kendra Portier, Tiffany Rhynard, Christina Providence, Kristin Hapke, Ashley Friend, Lauren Griffin
Structured with repetitions of Tchaikovsky's Valse Sentimentale, this work asked questions concerning choreographic choices and methods. From this piece, Vanessa developed what she called "poetic-relational body" which refers to the dancer's ability to change the definition of "body" according to context and poetic intention. Also, Vanessa realized her desire to create pieces by inter-relating texts that exist outside the dance, and to make choreographing an open-process that is responsive to itself and its working environment. Created as part of the requirements for Master of Fine Arts in Choreography at Ohio State University. Performed at Danspace Project, NYC as part of Bebe Miller's curated program, "Academy Dances."
Other Early Works:
Canary and the Gray Matter (2004)
length: 3 minutes, solo
This short solo explored changes of effort quality.
Observing Mona (2003)
length: 4 minutes, solo
Swallow (2002)
length: 7 minutes, 6 dancers
mother invention (2001)
length: 5 minutes, solo
The movement vocabulary for this piece was developed by researching photographs and videotape of master-choreographer, Pina Bausch, in her rehearsal process. It is a dance inspired by the mental, perceptual, and physical motions performed while choreographing. Music: Poulenc's Stabat Mater
Banyan (1999)
length: 6 minutes
The trio, with original Gamelan-based musical score by Takashi Koshi, was inspired by spirillic movement, grounding and growing roots, and memories of living in Indonesia.
Along the Way (1998)
length: 10 minutes
This group dance for four women originated Vanessa's interest in parallel structure (like parallel thinking or parallel worlds), and was built to repetitions of Dvorak's 'Going Home'-Largo of Symphony No. 9 (in drastically varying instrumentation.)
Chiasma (1996)
length: 8 minutes
This dance was made in tandem to a 91-page thesis concerning the phenomenology of dance for the completion of Vanessa's BA in Religious Studies/Philosophy at Pomona College. The group piece was inspired by quantum physics' observer created reality, and subject-object dichotomy.