CONCERT DANCE
Jenna Del Monte Zavrel is a choreographer, screendance filmmaker, educator, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersections of concert dance, film, memory, and collaborative creative practice. Her choreography and screendance films have been presented nationally and internationally, with screenings, performances, and festival selections spanning more than ten countries.
Artistic Statement
My creative research explores the ways memory, human connection, and lived experience shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. Working across concert dance and screendance, I create immersive choreographic environments that invite performers and audiences to engage with vulnerability, transformation, and emotional resonance.
Historical events, personal narratives, and embodied memories often serve as points of departure for my work. Rather than recreating a story literally, I am interested in uncovering the emotional landscapes that exist beneath it—the sensations, tensions, and relationships that linger long after an experience has passed. Through movement, film, sound, and spatial design, I seek to create works that balance abstraction with accessibility, allowing viewers to attach their own memories and interpretations to the performance experience.
My choreographic process begins with questions: How does the body physically respond to a thought, memory, or feeling? What aspects of that response can be amplified through motion, time, space, or cinematic perspective? Improvisation serves as a primary research tool, generating movement vocabularies rooted in authentic human response rather than predetermined aesthetics.
Collaboration is central to my practice. Dancers actively contribute to the evolution of the work through exploration, interpretation, and embodied inquiry. By creating structures that encourage agency and discovery, I seek to cultivate performances that feel immediate, nuanced, and deeply human.
Whether presented on stage or on screen, my goal is to create experiences that transcend observation and foster connection. I am interested in the capacity of dance to slow time, heighten awareness, and illuminate the shared emotional experiences that connect us across individual histories and perspectives. Increasingly, my work investigates the intersection of choreography and filmmaking, exploring how cinematic tools such as framing, editing, and visual composition can expand the expressive possibilities of movement and offer new ways of engaging audiences. Through both live performance and screendance, I seek to create work that invites reflection, sparks curiosity, and fosters meaningful human connection.