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This October Jennifer Gwirtz and Right Brain Performance Lab tour their new work, What Stays, at three different private homes in the Bay Area.
What Stays takes the audience on “a journey mapped with layers of dance, song, sound and shadows of each home”. The work explores the character of three different people who interact with the environments and stories of the homes. The dancers worked in modules, adapting the piece to the three diverse and unique environments in which they dance. Jennifer says, “The piece is really an amoeba, growing in each home”.
Laura Marsh
Jennifer is active in the community of home theater, a movement that de-centers performance art from traditional spaces, instead showcasing professional dance and theater in homes around the world. Jennifer discovered the genre of home theater in 1994 while living in New Zealand. There she found that the unique genre allowed freedom from the monetary and physical constraints of renting a traditional theater space in which to show work. “Trying to get into spaces and festivals is just very unsustainable for an artist. With home theater we had sold out performances and pretty big spaces. People were so excited! We would often add an extra show.”
When Jennifer returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998 she discovered the home theater movement based in the Oakland Hills led by Phillip Huang. In 2010 Huang launched the Home Theater Festival in which he invited artists from all over the world to present work in their homes. Jennifer, a participant in this festival offered her home as a venue last year.
Jennifer’s interest in non-traditional performance spaces and virtuality is what inspires her to participate in dance anywhere. She says, “dance anywhere appropriates dance ideas, bringing many people into the legacy of dance that is usually only reserved for professional staged performance”. She loves the way that dance anywhere connects people virtually. She says, “It’s the tree in the forest idea. No one usually sees the single man dancing alone on a street corner. Dance anywhere brings this dance to view and gives it legitimitacy”.
Find more about Jennifer Gwirtz and Right Brain Performance Lab’s What Stays at:
http://performancelab.org/
And find higher quality shots in Right Brain Performance Lab’s press section at:
http://performancelab.org/shows/2013/photos.html
And view Right Brain Performance Lab’s dance anywhere event page at:
http://www.danceanywhere.org/participant/rightbrainplab
