Profile: Jennifer Hart - Life on the Texas Arts A-list
Remember that sunny summer day at Pioneer Farm in north Austin? The wooden plank floor of the Wessels Hall clattered softly and occasionally tapped rhythmically to jazz shoes playing across its expanse. The occasion was Bluegrass Junction, a modern ballet adoration of traditional dances. They were performed to bluegrass music from across America, played from time out of mind.
Bluegrass Junction was breakout work by Performa/Dance, Jennifer Hart artistic director. It was exemplary of the choreographer about whom reviewers extolled, “with an imagination so exuberant that one could not be sure how one movement led to the next,” and “not only inventive but heart-rending.” Hart founded Performa/Dance in 2014 with Ballet Austin dancer Edward Carr. Principal guidance for Performa/Dance is by Hart, reflecting her driving, not-quite-obsessive visions (if ballet dancers and choreographers can ever be said NOT to be obsessive).
Hart hails from Minnesota, where she received her essential ballet training, with stints at Pacific Northwest Ballet and San Francisco Ballet. Since then, she has gained impressive experiences as a dancer and choreographer, centering in Minnesota and Austin, but with commissions and competitions and awards from coast to coast. She is employed as Curriculum Director for Ballet Austin Academy, where besides teaching she choreographs for Ballet Austin TWO. And of course, there is Performa/Dance, which received four Austin Critics Table awards in the first few years of its existence.
Since Bluegrass Junction, Hart has created Mad Scene, an off-the-leash hybrid of acting, performance art, stand-up comedy, and an exceptionally well-disciplined, genre-defying performance. The show, with pompadours all around and a decibel meter to measure its reality in audience response, was a send-up of the court of Louis XIV of France, le quatorze. Why? His reign and court are considered the womb of ballet. So, it seems that with the parodic, outrageous, time-traveling, occasionally mocking Mad Scene, Hart has taken a bite out of ballet’s own uterus. Talk about biting the afterbirth that feeds you.
All life severs the umbilicus to seek the outer universe, and in the case of Performa/Dance, that course directs to the future, one with new forms and unexpected resonances. Such promise forms the atmosphere of hope and expectation that surrounds Performa/Dance and sustains an art lover’s abiding interest in this company.
The summer of 2024 brings the highly anticipated Pivot, a follow-up to Mad Scene. Titles convey meaning on many levels, and Pivot conveys the obvious denotation of a sudden change in direction of movement or orientation. It may also convey a change in thought. With Performa/Dance it indicated a response to changes in plans, administration, and finances, all things that demand such a response, hence the pivot to an altered but still intensely creative vision.
Pivot as a show has the common composite structure of unrelated dance pieces produced by one host company, in this case Performa/Dance. Hart invited dances from three additional choreographers/groups for Pivot. They are Alexa Capareda, NYC’s Christian Warner, and the BLiPSWiTCH performance group. In a brief chat, Taryn Lavery, an artistic director of BLiPSWiTCH and dancer in Pivot, made clear that the composites of Pivot are nonhierarchical, that “Alice” does not dominate the other performance sections, and they in turn do not overwhelm “Alice.” Here is the task, the brilliance, and the difficulty in offering an innovative work of art.
Exploding? Identity, everything from sexual, behavioral, and ethnic, has exploded in our polymorphous time. It is no wonder that in an on-line interview, Alexa Capareda wrote, “I think there’s a focus on identity, how queerness and strangeness are defined, distinguishing oneself as a person and artist through one’s work, and perhaps even finding one’s way through the art one creates.” From the title, we are clued that while looking (in Wonderland) it is Alice who is trying to find Alice. She may search any of Wonderland’s bizarre characters for refractions of herself. Some shine, some glow, some obscure."
The character of Alice is deconstructed heavily by one-of-a-kind Kelsey Oliver, a university-trained dancer who seems, at our 21st century horizon, to be singlehandedly resurrecting movement-based performance art. She can and does deconstruct all of “Alice” and the characters she takes on. Oliver performs on stage, or grassy lawns, or concrete slab parking garages. But wherever she performs she is the driving force, through her nonlinear narratives. Along the way she moves upside down and all around; she is noted for moving flat out on the stage floor, sprawling, but seeming to defy gravity. But is that dance, much less ballet? Capareda was ready for that question: “Genre-wise, it is contemporary ballet, highly physical with a lot of movement. It plays with grace and quirk and surprise, with some dynamic things that travel across the space, but also many moments of quickly and deftly going down and up from the floor.” The performances by guest choreographers, including Capareda, resemble diverse chapters in Alice’s story, each with imagery and storytelling that enrich the whole.
Finally, Oliver as Alice-multiples brings together the disparate components of the show, much as she accomplished so surprisingly in Mad Scene. We see her reaching out blindly into the dark unknown and finding gems of great value. Is that the secret of Pivot?
Only Jennifer Hart knows for sure. She shows adeptness at creating performances that aren’t this or that, but are always, stunningly new. This is the sometimes-uncategorizable newness the 21st century demands, and Jennifer Hart’s esthetic, joined with resurgent modern ballet, are setting forth those gems to shine in our time.
Hart may not see her career as a march into the future. She likens her work, produced one show at a time, to a series of paintings by a visual artist set down end to end. The artist paints one at a time without planning a future, seeing only the canvas in front of the artist. Later, examining the first and the last paintings in the line and comparing them, one can perceive evolution and change that may not have been conscious or intentional. The last three examples in Hart’s line-up of major artworks (Bluegrass Junction, Mad Scene, Pivot) are performative triumphs that push the envelope of urbanized 21st-century culture. One important point of Hart’s intentionality, however, is that she strives to “reach beyond the boundaries of concert dance.” In that way, she continues “to push myself,” leaving the future to take care of itself. Austin and Texas are lucky to have Jennifer Hart.
Also:
Feature by Neha Kondaveeti in the Austin Chronicle, August 16, 2024
Pivot
by Performa/Dance
Performa/Dance
August 16 - August 17, 2024
WHO: Performa/Dance
WHAT: “PIVOT”
WHEN: August 16th, 7:30pm and August 17th, 2024 at 4:30pm and 7:30pm
WHERE: Ballet Austin, AustinVentures StudioTheater
501 W 3rd St, Austin, TX 78701
TICKETS: $25-50, performadance.org
The performance runs 75 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission. This production is supported in part by the City of Austin’s Elevate Grant Program.
