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Photo: Peter Hinsdale
The Jenna was a 2023-2024 Choreographer in Residence for second cohort of the Chicago Cultural Center Dance Studio Residency. The Dance Studio Residency provides space, time and funding for Chicago dancemakers to create new work, and each artist or group offers free public engagements – artists talks, workshops, works-in-progress and more – to build diverse intersections and welcome more dialogue between audiences and artists.
\\ Previous Work Highlights
November 3-4, 2023: Hedwig Dances premiere
fall series - "no ideas but in things"
Ruth Page Center for the Arts
Ahead of The Yard's 50th Anniversary this residency engaged the institution with historic research, site-specific activation, and conversations of its positionality in the contemporary dance ecosystem.
Could we encourage them to forefront the lessons of their archives as a practice of their future? How could we celebrate the campus as a collection of memories, people, and architecture, while simultaneously pushing their politics further? How do artists hold the layered, complex, and sometimes contradictory identities of an organization while in residence? And how do we want to be held?
This piece is an ongoing collaboration with mechanical engineer and sustainable designer Dr. Benjamin Linder. We are exploring the intersection of materiality and agency, working inside states of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction to consider what is in our control.
Working budget: bit.ly/JPPboxbudget
**This piece is yet unnamed, though this specific residency in 2021 culminated in public performances. I avoid naming conventions until the work is done as a practice of agency and self-determination. This allows my projects to center process over product, ensures that I stack funds to reach for thriving wages for my team no matter how many grant cycles it takes, and better insulates the creative process from the political pressure I conjure outside the studio with my other hats on.
Work in Process**
\ Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) Residency: 2020-2021 Season
Read Jenna's BCA profile here
Read The Boston Globe feature here
Check out the Sketch Model at Olin College project here
Old North
'Old North' (2022)
\ Inspired by the architecture, history, and community of Boston’s oldest church known for its role in the American Revolution, a group of artists and dancers inhabit a site that is both a national park and a parish. For one year they follow the site’s daily rhythms, and offer slight alterations of actions and practices traditionally embedded in the space. In the final months, they document their embodied research, inviting participation and play from their friends, peers, clergy, congregation, park staff, and tour groups. Although filmed in 2019, a foreshadowing emerges that touches on the personal and communal, the public and the private, the past and the present. Old North is an introspective portrait of a sacred and civic space, paired with music by Andrew Bird and held together like a poem.
Created by Sue Murad and Jenna Pollack
Produced by Reciprocity Collaborative
70 minutes
E.LEE Collaborations
Collaborations with E.LEE
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Professional Program Commissions
\ ". . . and Smell the Roses": February 2019, Chicago Art Department
\ "In The Red": March 2020, University of Chicago Logan Center
Read the UChicago Arts Blog review here
". . . and Smell the Roses" is immersive gallery experience at The Chicago Art Department. The dancers underwent an “art heist” amidst the performance, entangling and implicating the artist, the venue staff, and the audience.
"In The Red" is an immersive performance where the audience joined the dancers as they descended down 22 flights of stairs in the university’s arts building. The piece explores the complexity of currency as it affords, denies, and perpetuates our everyday rhythms. Through the subversion of expectations and co-authorship with the architecture, guests were an integral part of raising questions of a fantasy land perhaps not so far from home.
'Who is Eartha Mae', Bridge Repertory Theater (2019)
\ A One-Woman Play With Music About the Life + Times of Eartha Kitt
Read the Boston Globe here
Read the Broadway World review here
Read the Arts Fuse review here
U.S. State Department - Embassy to Colombia
\ - Arts Envoy in residence virtually summer-fall 2021 at the University of Caldas in
collaboration with the Colombian-American Center of Manizales
- Dramaturgical Assistant for 'Hombre Flor' at Festival de Manizales
- Visiting Lecturer in Choreography
- Presentation 'A Working Dramaturgy of Engineering in Performance' at 2020 Festival Internacional de la Imagen in partnership with University of Caldas and Encuentros Manizales
Trailers and Features (click to jump)
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DANCE
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THEATER: Choreography, Movement Direction, and Site Specific
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UNIVERSITIES: Theater and Dance
DANCE
THEATER: Choreography, Movement Direction, and Site Specific
UNIVERSITIES: Theater and Dance
\\ Ragtime, Salem State University
\\ YARDWORK: The Yard's interactive, virtual artmaking prompt Summer 2020 (link)
