backDROP: Jillian Peña

In response to Susana’s text, in my performance work, process is nearly irrelevant. The piece only exists when it is being watched. This is true not only in my performances, but also with my single-channel videos.
I verbally address the audience in the work, guiding them and giving them instructions that they chose to follow or not. The viewer becomes the subject, and without that, there is nothing. In my work, therefore, everything but the live transmission is like a decoration, a pointing to it. The video, the sound, and the performance material contextualize the experience. In a generic way, I use common landscapes and pop music to create location and emotion—even if it is the recognition that you should have a certain emotion, but don’t.
I use contemporary dance frequently as decoration. Dance proper within the work is a common language between the work and the viewers, as my performances are presented frequently in the dance community. I propose that the dance is located in the audience body—in the witnessing of the performance and the audience’s subjectivity. In this action of attempting to activate the audience body is a central theme of the work—connecting to an other and forming a relationship.

By placing my work in the contemporary dance community, I am questioning the ontology of both dance and choreography. In my recent performance, MOTHERSHIP, the two performers created all the movement, yet I called myself the choreographer, and them the creators of movement. While it is understood that to choreograph is to create movement, I propose that the term is about direction and production, and that movement is something that can take shape in a body, an audience body, or a space. Recently, young choreographers in New York have used dance movement made by other choreographers, both historical figures and those currently active within the community, but retained the title choreographer. Although appropriation has been common for decades in fine art, this is new territory for dance, and is the subject of my written element. My research will look at this directly not just through content, but also through form, as I appropriate the structure of the book Exhausting Dance, by Andre Lepecki, a popular contemporary dance theorist. Choreography translated literally is dance writing, and I wish to approach this research in a similar form as the work itself.

Unlike Susana, performance was at the center of my entire education. I began dancing at age three, was trained by Baptists who told us that our bodies were vessels for the lord, performed with a ballet company, and worked as a stripper. I later found the contemporary dance community of New York, where all these elements in my practice background were utilized in both my work and that of other choreographers. I currently develop material for my work through dance improvisation and stream of consciousness narration. I am committed to placing my work in both the dance community and the fine art one, as the separation between the two is extremely outdated.