I am cultivating an aesthetic that navigates the space between fleeting tragedies and bizarre humor, and at the same time placing emphasis on sensation and experience generated from the body in conversation with external aesthetics. My work calls for weathered bodies whose weight and complex identity carry rural notions to urban time frames. I constantly depart from an assumed sentimentality in hopes of finding a preciousness that is steeped in the work. I am concerned with the potential of an image, rather than the image itself. Rather than crafting transitions that aid in understanding a linear schedule, I explore how one thing tolerates the next, sometimes finding a thread of connectivity and other times not. I am interested in structure as a non-fixed architecture, queered, unknown and unannounced until it resonates.

Rosenblit was a 2009 recipient of Dance Theater Workshop's Fresh Tracks residency and sat on the artist panel for The 2010 Fresh Tracks series. She has taught at Bowdoin College in Maine, UMass Amherst, the LAJF Foundation in Denmark and through classclassclass in New York City. In spring 2011 she will set work on students at Hollins University as well as Hampshire College. Her current workshops focus on facilitating dance and performance making through methods that help us create a context in which anything is possible. She is a guest curator at Dixon Place as well as a current Studio Series artist at Dance Theater Workshop. Rosenblit's newest duet in progress was curated in Ben Pryor's American Realness APAP festival.


I am dedicated to a sincere research in performance aesthetics.



class and workshop descriptions



Making Performance:

Before the Movement


Launched at Bowdoin College through a teaching artist residency 2008


Starting with our knowledge of maps, quantitative information and visual layout, we will make performance. Before the movement happens or even narrative or theme, we will create maps. What is on this map, does it speak to land masses, borders, abstract pattern, design, population, personal history? How can someone else read this map and what information is conveyed or withheld based on visual information? We will make maps, trade maps, draw on top of preexisting maps and begin to move away from the very documentation of the map. We will move toward a more physical state in the body. We will become the travelers and instead of solely imitating or replicating our maps with spatial patterns, we will embody personal geographies as a way to begin to make dance and performance. We will think critically about how much of ourselves exists within the work and make critical decisions based on what the work calls for.


I Wanna Do Right But Not Right Now:

Performance Workshop


Launched as part of classclassclass 2010


Responding to the need of thinking about the live moments of people watching our bodies perform, this class looks at methods for developing approaches to establish ourselves as performers. We will look at the external worlds and landscapes we make, internalize and process and contextualize these spaces and finally speak of the experience critically. We are searching for our own delicacy, we are seeing how far we can go, we are locating availability for the audience to absorb us. This is less about the making of dance and more about the performance of it.


For bookings and questions contact:

Jen Rosenblit

jrosenblit@gmail.com


A disappearing history.


salivate if you could, Studio Series Dance Theater Workshop 03.2011

Hold Everything, Movement Research Festival 06.2010

When Them, Danspace Project Platform 2010 03.2010

CloseClose Part, Grace Exhibition Space AUNTS 05.2009

Everlast and So Badly, Dance Theater Workshop 01.2009

Maybe Sprout Wings, Joyce SoHo 05.2008

That Sick Sound, MR at The Judson Church 10.2007

Underbelly and Superfly Afterthoughts, Dixon Place 02.2007


The Wood and Pearl Sequence, Joyce SoHo 04.2006


Curb, Dixon Place 12.2005




24.6.10

Finding Language.

I find the desperation between fleeting tragedies and bizarre humor to be a very active location for the body, as well as bodies in relation to one another. I depart from preciousness and sentimentality on a conceptual level in hopes of locating a more potent relevance for how we read relational aesthetics and objects in space and time. Observing what already exists on the body, what I place onto it or take away from it, has been crucial to my investigation. Rather than training performers to look and act like me, i insert methods to attain constant awareness on the line between memory and experience.
I am concerned with detaching and reapplying visual histories, how time and situational tendencies can assume familiar outcomes, and how the way that one thing tolerates the next becomes a rule for how we occupy time. I tend to use bodies to occupy landscapes or visual fields rather than purposeful markings on time and space. I try to breed rural notions within urban time frames and often create something that requires its own set of rules for navigation.
Delicate perversion coils my work while the physicality of the bodies dominates a general aesthetic. There is something familiar and uncomfortable about the moving body. The body feeds more information than any awesome concept or lighting plot. I lean toward the idea that my work is not autobiographical, this can be argued on many levels but it is not my goal with performance. There is often no glorious ending and not much for people to take with them when they leave. People want something. Placing myself within the work is becoming a clearer choice rather than default these days. I use myself as a performer because I like to interact with the work in this way. This is where a lot of the exploration happens for me.
My choreographic approach is more of a cartographer or information analyst. As a performer of the work I get to bring dimension to the flatland of information and begin to explain that exploration to the other performers. I situate my work in a space where endless distraction makes you feel like there is bound to be an eventual truth. Since this place is completely manifest on invented inquiries, there isn't always an obligation to unveil or humanize or tenderize the body with movement. Engaging in the discourse of body memory and body experience, I can isolate tendencies and desires to then manipulate visual exhibitions of bodies. Once I feel as though we have located a coherent moment of either memory or experience, I tend to place an outside distraction over the whole process. Be it adding unrelated music or irrelevant props, a beautiful moment of bodies moving in design can occur and be overlooked at the same time.
My concepts and movement structures at times dissolve each other. I am reaching for a more heightened subtlety of experience. I don't find modern dance to be nearly as abstract as the world around me. The smell of rain, endless laughing, disgust, wanting more time-these are all abstract situations that I don't hope to recreate with dance but to begin to engage sensation with visual information.
I'm not sure if my work is about anything more than the absurdity of the body. I'm building space for the viewer to experience indentation, for eyes that find molding and packaging as important as a love story. Sometimes I also just make up moves that I think would be totally awesome in my dance!