Acts After Ends

By Jeanine Durning

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Acts after Ends grapples with the unwieldy and untamed poetics of desire, grief, urgency, and purpose in an ever-shifting and volatile world. Set in a room within another room, with everyday objects that are organized, reorganized and disorganized, three performers continually frame and reframe recurring scenes that blur the lines between memory of what was, what is, and the possibility of what could be. Somewhere between language and body, thought and action, choreography and chance, Acts after Ends unapologetically contends with how to create meaning and togetherness in the midst of calamity, and asks how can we begin again, over and over, as an ongoing, radical act of repair against loss and uncertainty.

Acts after Ends works closely with Durning’s signature performance practice, nonstopping, using both movement and speech acts, as a jumping off point to both challenge and harness the undeniable forces of uncontrollable change. Acts after Ends asks: how can we maintain agency of our choices within a world that is moving faster than we can keep up? How do we keep going in the break, in the midst of the ruins of systems and structures that are dismantling? In a time when attention is a political and cultural currency, how can we attend with imaginative awareness to our personal and collective experience? With fierce physicality and readiness of mind, how can we create and reimagine new possibilities, a new language, a new kind of togetherness within this untreatable velocity?

Through unstoppable looping scenarios of moving and speaking, Acts after Ends amplifies both the precision and precarity of the performer’s decision – making from moment to moment, held by personal desire and the inescapable need for one another. By contending with conditions and structures that are just out of reach, Acts after Ends expertly plays with nuances of time, place, situation, and communication, creating unpredictable relations and temporary meanings in a uncertain and tender world.

BASIC SPECIFICATIONS Stage— Open look, no wings/legs Performers— 3 performers Lighting—lighting grid and light board Sound— Sound System, Sound Board, one wireless speaker Props— 2 black wooden theater cubes 18’’x18’’x18’’; 1 freestanding door; 1 sofa couch; 1 carpet; 1 duffle bag; 3 folding chairs; 1 mic stand. Technicians— 2 stagehands, 1 lighting designer / operator, 1 audio engineer

Full details, audio, track specs and lighting plot available on request

PHOTOGRAPHS

VIDEO PREVIEW Rehearsal video | Excerpt

ABOUT JEANINE DURNING Jeanine Durning is an Alpert Award winning choreographer and performer whose work has been described by The New Yorker as having both “the potential for philosophical revelation and theatrical disaster.” She has been investigating the mobilizing and mutable force of bodies and grappling with their conditions in time, space, and place for over 25 years through experiments in choreography, performance, and practice-based research. Durning’s work interrogates the dancing body’s potential to shift perception of self, other and the spaces we (collectively) inhabit. Often blurring lines between artistic disciplines, her choreographies reimagine ways for thinking and feeling to come into form, action, and communication, revealing how our basic need for connection aligns, or misaligns, with our desires. Durning’s ongoing practice, nonstopping, has been the foundation for her teaching and choreographic praxis since 2010, and acts as a philosophical outlook on the longevity and sustainability of an artist’s practice overtime. She performed her critically, and audience, acclaimed solo inging (based on her nonstop speaking practice) across the US, in Europe and Canada on and off from 2010-2020. In 2023, together with writer/editor Jenn Joy and the support of MANCC and The Mellon Foundation, Durning published a book centered around her practice of nonstopping. Durning has had the privilege to collaborate with many choreographers, including in her early years David Dorfman Dance (1993-2003), and with her mentor Deborah Hay since 2005. Jeanine has worked as performer, choreographic assistant, coach, and consultant to Motion Bank (a project of The Forsythe Company) for Ms. Hay’s work. From 2020-2023, Jeanine worked as Rehearsal Director for Stockholm based contemporary dance company Cullberg, transmitting, directing, and internationally touring Hay’s choreographic works. Jeanine has been invited to share some of her practices all over the world through teaching, mentoring/advising, and creating choreographies. Some of her choreographic commissions include This Shape, We are In with Toronto Dance Theatre (2019), Last Shelter with Candoco Dance Company/London, UK (2021), and Everlasting – a new love with Norrdans/Sweden (2023), as well as several artist-initiated commissions in the States and in Sweden.

ARTIST BIOS Recently recognized as one of the ’25 To watch’ in 2024 by Dance Magazine, Miguel Alejandro Castillo (performer, producer) is drawn to the permeability of art forms and the new inquiries that arise from cross- disciplinary and multicultural collaborations. His research investigates diasporic imagination and future folklore. Castillo has performed in the works of Faye Driscoll, Jeanine Durning, Tzveta Kassabova, among others. He holds a bachelor’s in dance and theater from Middlebury College and an M.F.A in Choreography and Performance from Smith College.

Sarah Konner (performer, producer) is a dance artist and improviser. She creates dance-theater at performance venues, universities, and museums across the country. She has worked with Jeanine Durning, Jenna Reigel, ChavasseDance&Performance, Sara Shelton Mann, Shura Baryshnikov, Alex Springer and Xan Burley, Headlong Dance Theater, and setGo Performance. Konner teaches dance in New York and internationally and is currently a Associate Professor at the Boston Conservatory. She holds an M.F.A. in Dance at Smith College, a B.F.A. in Dance and a B.S. in Environmental Science from the University of Michigan.

Erin Kouwe (performer, producer) is a creator and dance artist whose work explores disorientation, memory and identity through collaborative dance-making that can actualize alternative futures and imagine new worlds in performance. She is a recipient of the Tennessee Arts Commission's Individual Artist Fellowship and the Gretchen Moran Research Fellowship. Her work has been presented by Nashville Ballet, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, Tennessee Women’s Theater Project, A.P.E. Gallery, and Going Dutch Festival, where she has been a featured Commissioned Artist. Kouwe has danced with New Dialect, Visceral Dance Chicago, and Luna Negra Dance Theater. She holds an M.F.A. in Choreography and Performance from Smith College and a B.A. in Dance from Point Park University. She is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Slippery Rock University, and has taught at Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Hampshire Colleges, UMass Amherst, Belmont University, and Nashville Ballet’s Professional Training Division.

XenoDuo (set and costume design) is a creative collective between visual artist Xinan Ran (b.1994, Inner Mongolia, China) and Miguel Alejandro Castillo (b.1993, Caracas, Venezuela). Since 2017, the duo has been collaborating on installation and performance projects exploring migration, mobility, and the nuanced art of cross-cultural and transatlantic homemaking. Xinan Ran received her MFA from Hunter College (2022), and BFA from Pratt Institute (2017). Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by the New York Magazine Matrix, Xinan is a New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient, was a mentee in New York Foundation for the Arts’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2023), a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center resident (2022), and an Ox-Bow Summer Fellow (2016). Apart from her studio practice, Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator, and set designer for new theaters. Learn more at xinanran.work Mandy K. Ringger (lighting design) has been designing locally, nationally, and internationally for over 20 years with artists such as Faye Driscoll, Cynthia Oliver, Doug Elkins, Leslie Cuyjet, Molly Poerstel, Ivy Baldwin, Laura Peterson, Darrah Carr, Antonio Ramos, Alexandra Beller, Sean Donovan, and cakeface, among many others. She received a BA from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD and an MFA from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She is the recipient of a Bessie award for her collaboration on Faye Driscoll’s 837 Venice Boulevard at HERE Arts Center.

PRESS for Jeanine Durning’s work “Five minutes in, a kind of electricity had taken hold in the room... She was the embodiment of the present.” Andrew Boyton, The New Yorker

“It’s like watching people live, right in the thick of passing time.” Siobhan Burke, The New York Times

“Edgy, unpredictable and so alive and immediate that it is hard as an observer not to be drawn in. You simply can’t tell what might happen next.” Michael Crabb, The Toronto Star

“An energy of generosity and urgency.” Rennie McDougal, Culturebot

“It’s as if they were searching for their place in existence.” Tidningen Angermanland, Harnosand, SE

CONTACT : email: jdurningdance@gmail.com | phone: +1 802 377 8083