Jennie MaryTai Liu
DANCE RESEARCH FELLOW
English-born, Hong Kong-bred, I have lived in NYC for ten years making performances that have been presented by Dance Theater Workshop, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, HERE Arts Center, American Dance Festival through Hollins University, the Bushwick Starr, Movement Research at the Judson Memorial Church, American Dance Festival, as well as in international venues such as WUK (Vienna), Ballet de Lorraine (Nancy). I’ve been awarded residencies at Yaddo Arts Colony, The Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and am currently an Artist-in-Residence at HERE Arts Center, as well as at BAX. I have also had the pleasure of performing with Big Dance Theater, Witness Relocation Company, Cathy Weis Projects, Faye Driscoll and Nellie Tinder. I trained as an undergraduate at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU, and received my MFA from Hollins University.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The performance I created during my first year as an Artist-in-Residence at BAX was the first in the multi-format project LANDS AND PEOPLES, a series of works that explore shifting personal experiences of home, family, spirituality, and culture. Over the course of the next year, as a Research Fellow at BAX, I will dig deeper into a praxis that merges experimental performance forms with ethnography and documentary.
As a creator of original performances, documentary material of real life subjects- from family members to celebrities, has been invaluable to my process and vocabulary. We use this source material as vocal and gestural choreography, and shape the situations in the documents into narrative frames with which to view dance. Through making art I see more closely the people in my life, whether by interviewing, or studying closely documents of their strange movements and behaviors.
Phase two of LANDS AND PEOPLES is driven in part from this love of human idiosyncracy — displayed through movement, stories and behavior. Over the course of a year, I will seek out and get to know a group of three or four individuals who have immigrated to the US in their lifetimes, and for whom the performing arts (dance, theater, traditional/folk forms) is or has been a dominant presence in their lives. I am interested in how the skills, values and worldviews of a performing artist might range between communities, sub-cultures, personal experiences- and how these art-inflected imperatives might have been shaped or shifted by the rupture of immigration.
Every ten days to a fortnight I will meet with one individual and spend time with them either in a public space, one of our personal spaces, or in one of the studios at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Each meeting will yield an addition to a collection of documents that will take the form of either video, audio, written or danced transcriptions of the meeting. At the end of my year as a Research Fellow, this collection will be shared with the public as an event lying at the intersection of installation, performance and cross-community gathering.
