2020-2021 Dancemakers Resident

Project Description

Jenna Pollack works explicitly collaborative with her artistic and institutional teams, and in latticing between disciplines offers: look what we can make together, and only together. In exploring the poetics of politics, the purpose of play, and the functionality of materiality in the arts, she believes artists are also valuable partners in scientific and political initiatives.

Joining the realms of engineering and movement, this work is exploring embodied questions around our accountability for and to innovation. With co-director Dr. Benjamin Linder, a mechanical engineer researching sustainable design at Olin College, research to-date has prototyped wooden figures that operate as both characters and landscapes, and the beginning of physical language-building between them and the dancers. The project is working with the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of physical and emotional states to consider: What actions are within our control? What do we lose through inaction, and what happens when that is outrun out by the inertia of our previous choices?