project: The Jenkins Farm Project

Student Researchers:
Choreographer: Annie Arnoult Beserra
in collaboration with Vera Blaine, Kahtryn Enright, Alan Hardison, Todd Lahrman, Matt Reed, and Ashley Thorndike

Description:
Annie Beserra's MFA work "The Jenkins Farm Project" juxtaposes words, images and moving bodies in configurations that challenge audience members to re-examine previous assumptions about these 'texts' and their relationship to the audience members' own understandings and experiences of home, family, mental illness and memory. The project investigates the potential of performance, in the specific form of dance theater, to provide a uniquely agile medium of research, opening doors for the emergence of both an embodied investigation of a particular socio-cultural experience and a cross-modal (visual, aural, and kinesthetic) perspective on the interpretations, conclusions, and questions that arise from such an investigation. The collaboration involves two composers, an architect and five dancers.

Autumn 2007