Photo: Natalie Fiol

…artist in movement

One afternoon in 2006, I unwittingly agreed to join two of my best musician friends, who would be graduating college and leaving town soon, to play music at a demonstration of something called “contact improvisation”.  I arrived at the venue innocently enough, with a cymbal, a stand and a wide array of instruments to be struck, bowed, rubbed, shaken, blown into and across, etc.  However, I had no idea that I would experience the profundity of the connection between movement and sound and have my love for movement ignited.  Nor did I expect an experience which would dramatically change my musical world, shape my desires as a musician and person and start me on a path to devoting my musical life to the dance.

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Today, as a musician, composer and dance maker, I partner with modern dance, contact improvisation and West African dance in class, rehearsal and performance, for teacher/choreographers Jan Erkert, Kirstie Simson (who led that landmark contact improvisation event), John Toenjes, Tamin Totzke, Djibril Camara and others.  In November 2011, I performed live music as part of Sara Hook’s Patriot Act Up as part of Dance at Illinois’s November Dance concert.

As a teacher, I recently assisted Prof. John Toenjes’s Dance 100, an introductory dance course for non-dance majors, focusing on dance and music in American modern dance.  In spring 2012, I will be assisting Toenjes teaching Dance 268 – Music for Dancers.

I am currently assisting the installation and maintenance of Motion-Based Interactive (MOBI) artist John Toenjes’s stage set from Astral Convertible (Reimagined) at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois.  This reimagining of choreographer Trisha Brown’s 1989 dance Astral Convertible was presented by Dance at Illinois in 2010.

In May 2011, I performed as a dancer and worked as a technician and co-designer in View Profile, a multi-site, internet-enabled telematic dance performance between the Krannert Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, IL, and the Sonic Arts Research Center in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

I am a founding member and musician/mover with Colab, an improvisation-based interdisciplinary performance group.  The group formed out of a class which met Fall 2010 – Improvisation and Interdisciplinary Collaboration for Musicians, Dancers and Engineers, led by dance professor Kirstie Simson, music composition professor Eric Lund and mechanical engineering professor Armand Beaudoin

Since August 2010, I have studied the improvisational movement practice of Kirstie Simson.

In March 2010, along with my classmates and Prof. John Toenjes, I presented Networked Dance Performance at the American College Dance Festival Association Central Region Conference.  The presentation was the result of a semester-long class investigating internet-enabled telematic dance performance and responsive dance environments, utilizing movement-modification of networked video and multi-channel CD-quality audio.  As part of the presentation, I performed percussion in real-time over the internet with musicians at the Sonic Arts Research Center in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Photo: Daniel R. James