“
Being a creative artist isn’t always about generating and production. It is knowing that you need hours and hours to process the world around you. It is having the discipline to sit in silence, allowing your heart and mind to open wide enough to hear a new world. It is only when you hear it, feel it, see it, that can you create it.
“
/ Jenna Del Monte /
Choreography Reel
Screen Dance
Artistic Statement
As a choreographer, my goal is to create an experience that incites visceral emotional responses from both the audience and the performing artist.
Using historical events and personal memories as primary source material, my dances capture an embedded version of a story and reveal the deeper thoughts and feelings associated with it.
Means:
Discovering honesty behind the movement vocabulary requires awareness of the kinesthetic response to the thought or feeling underlying the story.
My initial inquiry centers around questions such as, “How do I physically respond to this thought? To this feeling? What parts of that honest human reaction could be heightened through spatial design, motion, or time?” This creates a platform for the work and forms the essence of the dance.
Each work demands specificity. The movement vocabulary is carefully chosen through improvisation rooted primarily in two movement systems --- the Alwin Nikolais technique and the Laban Movement Analysis.
Nikolais suggests the dancer decentralize their ego and focus solely on four elements: time, space, shape, and motion. I use those elements in tandem with the eight action drive efforts of the Laban Movement System to develop phrase work that is rich and clearly intentioned.
Once crafted, I observe dancers responding to phrase work, allowing them to make choices in time and shaping, discovering what is palpable, sustainable, and supportive to the work. The dancers are often unaware of the piece’s context until much later in the process as we work strictly with movement development, spatial design, and qualitative range.
Using the supportive components of mindfully organized sound score, costume, and setting, I invite the audience to attach imagination and abstraction to their own human experience. I strive to warp their sense of time, completely immersing them in an alternate atmosphere --- one of vulnerability and depth.