Jeanine Durning at The Chocolate Factory
Company:
Jeanine Durning
THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY PRESENTS
Jeanine Durning
To Being (premiere)
September 9-19
Wednesdays thru Saturdays at 8pm
inging (reprise)
September 23-26
Wednesday thru Saturday at 8pm
@ The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, NYC 11101
*7 train to Vernon/Jackson (1st stop in Queens - 5 minutes from Grand Central!)
“Five minutes in, a kind of electricity had taken hold in the room…Nothing was rehearsed. We were part of Durning’s present, the first recipients of this speech, the first witnesses to her thoughts. A bond formed; we were getting to know her…Durning was vigilant—not only about what was going on inside her but about what was taking place there in the room, with us. She was the embodiment of the present.”
– Andrew Boynton, The New Yorker, on "inging"
August 10, 2015 – The Chocolate Factory (www.chocolatefactorytheater.org) launches itsTenth Anniversary season with the premiere of To Being, a new performance by Jeanine Durning, followed by the reprise of her 2010 performance inging. Tickets are $18 and may be purchased in advance at (212) 352-3101 or www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.
To Being is a choreography of persistence in the heart of jeopardy and precarity: the body continues in ongoing change, relations transform, meanings proliferate and fade. A companion work to Durning’s acclaimed solo performance practice, inging, To Being is based on the decidedly chosen practice of nonstopping — always moving absent destination — always becoming, never arriving. A psychosocial experiment, To Being opens to a landscape where radically divergent desires converge and empathy unfolds. To Being is dance as both ontological inquiry and homage, a force against the absolute, the nameable. To Being is a composition of endurance, a sonata of devotion. To Being is an unending search for an imperative relationship to movement in which dichotomies between self and other, material and immaterial, thought and action, incessantly dissolve. But more than anything else, To Being asks: “What’s at stake? Where’s the end? How can we give more when all we feel is that we’ve met our limit?”
Created by Jeanine Durning with Julian Barnett and Molly Poerstel. Directed by Jeanine Durning. Performed by Julian Barnett, Jeanine Durning, and Molly Poerstel. Sound byTian Rooteveel. Lighting by Joe Levasseur.
To Being was made possible, in part, through The Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program, funded, in part, by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Davis/Dauray Family Fund and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; by a Space Grant from BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and by a space grant from Abrons Art Center. In addition, Jeanine Durning researched, developed and honed To Being with financial, administrative and residency support from the Dance in Process Program at Gibney Dance.
The first work in a series based on Durning’s performance practice “nonstopping,” ingingproposes the insistent practice of unscripted nonstop languaging as performance, where speaker (performer) is in direct relation with listener (audience) at the moment of articulation. Part spoken word performance, part reverie, part dance, part oral biography, part meditation and psychotherapy, inging is a choreography of the mind, moving in the continuous present. It tracks the velocity of thought through a proprioceptive cascade of words. Both performer and audience are in perpetual disequilibrium, confronted with the limits of language as a paradigm for communication, knowledge and understanding. The body and its gesture emerge as the inevitable bridge between thought and language.
Created and performed by Jeanine Durning.
inging was first publicly performed in Amsterdam in 2010, and has since been invited to theaters, festivals, studios, museums and galleries in Berlin, Leuven, Zagreb, NYC, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Williamstown, and Chambersburg, with forthcoming performances in San Francisco in November 2015.
Jeanine Durning is a choreographer and performer from New York City. Durning began creating solo works in 1998, and group works soon after. Her evening length group choreographies include “Wishbone”(1998), “A Good Man Falls” (2002), “half URGE” (2004), “out of the kennel into a home” (2006), and “Ex-Memory: waywewere” (2009). Her work has been performed throughout NYC, across the U.S., in Europe, and Canada. Since 2002, she has created over fifteen original works, commissioned by companies and independent performers. In 2008, Durning was the recipient of The Alpert Award for Choreography and in 2007, The New York Foundation for the Arts for Choreography. She was recently nominated for a US Artists Fellowship. Her work has been supported by numerous residencies including most recently a Brooklyn Arts Exchange Space Grant, a Movement Research Artist in Residence and a Gibney Dance Dance in Process Residency, all toward her new work To Being.
