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New Project in Progress

June 9, 2022

Welcome to the first installment online portion of “And,” the performance I’m making to premiere at Abrons Arts Center March 30-April 2, 2017.  rehearsal video and an excerpt from something I’ve been reading that relates to the piece. As in the performance, I want the language (quoted, projected, animated, written and/or physical) here to offer ideas, sometimes contradictory, and create associations rather than pin down any one meaning. I post new entries to the top of this page; the page will grow as the performance does.

Lyn Hejinian from “The Rejection of Closure”
“Can form make the pri­mary chaos (the raw material, the unorganized impulse and in­formation, the uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? In my opinion, the answer is yes; that is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an activity.”

Paul Valéry, from Analects:
“Two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.

Alice Notley in Disobedience:
“my rule for this poem/ is honesty, my other rule is Fuck You”

Louis Bury from Exercises in Criticism:
“Within such a context, constraint, rather than being an unpleasant form of coercion, becomes a helpful mechanism for navigating quantitative overload- becomes, paradoxically, liberating.”

Eileen Myles from The Importance of Being Iceland:
“It simply strikes me that form has a real honest engagement with content and therefore might even need to get a little sleazy with it suggesting it stop early or go too far.”

Maggie Nelson from The Argonauts:
“Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained-inexpressibly!- in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, a deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.”

Robert Smithson from The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustration:
In the illusory babels of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying sytaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge… but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures… at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.”

Rebecca Solnit from “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable” :
“Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don’t entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.”

Kenny Goldsmith from BOMB Magazine conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum:
“It’s an interesting point. Having come through an art education and now teaching English, here’s what I’ve learned: English students function from the neck up; they don’t have bodies, they just have heads.”

Lyn Hejinian from The Rejection of Closure:
“Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, di­rections, number, and velocities of a work’s motion. The mate­rial aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of lan­guage itself.”

 

 

Helene Cixous:
“A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending. There’s no clo­sure, it doesn’t stop.”

George Eliot from Daniel Deronda:
“Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.”

Alice Notley from The Poetics of Disobedience:
“This work is all very disobedient, in a way it picks up where Disobedience left off; but it doesn’t lecture as much or shake its fist so, is less interested in the so called real than in denying its existence in favor of the real real. ”

Shawn Wen:
“Even words are asked to be more than descriptive. They cannot just represent. They cannot sit pretty and let the reader do the work. Even the words try to inhabit. To set a scene. Then the writer is just a wannabe actor. The actor can twist and bend. Now he is a bird. Now he is a flower. Writers must spell it out. F-L-O-W-E-R. And still, it’s just a word. It can’t dance. It can’t run. It can’t fall. You can read it. You can do so much as to pro-nounce it. Try to taste the sibilants as you tap your tongue against your teeth. But you still lack the shape and presence of a body.”

Asking Questions (Spring 2018)

6 minutes
Living at the Intersection

Photographer Jeff Whetstone and I hosted a panel about asking questions for an arts and engineering symposium at Princeton. We decided to introduce ourselves only through questions. I thought of mine as a small performance.

Daily Princetonian Essay, Spring 2022

A student in my Body and Language course wrote a gorgeous essay about our class and time together. He so beautifully describes basically all I most care about within teaching. Read it here: “Philosophy with the Body in It: My Experience Studying Dance at Princeton.”

Fall 2021

“This is not a book, really. It’s an act. Thoughts, images, words, feelings are pulled together, but the object created is not for sale.” Emilee Lord wrote a beautiful review of Gathering Space for thINKingDANCE.net

Recent Pieces Published Elsewhere

January 9, 2022

Editor and publisher of Gathering Space a chapbook which was distributed in bookstores and galleries throughout NYC for free, Spring 2021

Imagining- “Meditations on Computers and Presence in the Age of Distance” (Inaugural Issue, Fall 2020)

Currents 2020 Equilibrium and Balance– “A Note on Process” (Summer 2020)

InfiniteBody “Artists Reach Out: Aynsley Vandenbroucke” (Spring 2020)

Pidgin –  26 Short Assignments for Pidgin 26” (Fall 2019)

PAJ- A Journal of Performance and Art – “Bodies of Silence, Parts of an Essay” (Fall 2019)

Seneca Review“Statement of Divorce” (Spring 2018)

Movement Research Performance Journal- On Practice

BOMBlog- Interview with Brian Rogers

Performance Club- Reflections on an All Day Event

The Brooklyn Rail- Imaginary Education in the History of Written Dances

Critical Correspondence- Karinne Keithley in conversation with Aynsley Vandenbroucke

ThINKingDANCE review by Emilee Lord

October 30, 2021

“This is not a book, really. It’s an act. Thoughts, images, words, feelings, are pulled together, but the object created is not for sale. It was free for the taking at a number of book shops and galleries throughout New York City and beyond. The works contained in it are a treatise of the experience of self, other, society, and space during the pandemic. Beyond its content, I find Gathering Space important as an object.” Read full review here.

Practice

Semester long course designed for pandemic remote learning during Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, taught at Princeton University. (See PU webpage here: Princeton Course Offerings.)

The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. With school as we know it upended, we have a unique opportunity to develop daily habits that contribute to lifelong independent learning and creating. We will look at practice as both verb and noun, paying special attention to the ways we embody the work (and change) we want to see in the world. Through somatic activities, talks with invited guests, projects, and readings (across the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, and activism), we’ll revel in the interplay between process and product, solitude and community, structure and freedom, life and art.

Readings include:

  • adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
  • Linda Hartley, The Wisdom of the Body Moving
  • Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
  • Arzu Mistry and Todd Elkin, Unfolding Practice: Reflections on Learning and Teaching
  • James Baldwin, The Creative Process
  • angel Kyudo williams, Lama Rod Owens, Jasmine Syedullah, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation

Spring and Summer 2021

Writing 2020

September 2020- Essay Published!

An essay I worked on this summer, “Meditations on Computers and Presence in the Age of Distance” was recently published in the inaugural issue of Imagining: A Gibney Journal, edited by the amazing Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Summer 2020 + Recent

I’ll be in a Narrative Arts residency at Governors Island through Pioneer Works for ten weeks this summer. More about this soon. Also, a piece of mine, “Bodies of Silence, Parts of an Essay,” was recently published by PAJ- A Journal of Performance and Art (September, 2019).  Read past that first page! The essay gets formally experimental as it goes.

March 4, 2020 7pm

“Does Dance Matter to America?” A Long Table discussion at Gibney (280 Broadway, NYC). Details here.

November 13, 2019

I’ll be performing new work in progress as part of Brooklyn Bound, hosted by the amazing So Percussion. Aaron Edgecomb and Jenny Beck also perform. Sō Percussion studio. 20 Grand Ave, #205, Brooklyn (between Flushing and Park). $10 suggested donation. Doors open at 7:45pm

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Body and Language

semester long course at Princeton University

In this studio course open to all, we’ll dive into experiences in which body and language meet. We’ll think about these from aesthetic, cultural, political, personal, and philosophical perspectives. We’ll play with the physicality of voice and the material qualities of words and sentences. We’ll find literary structures in movement. We’ll explore language from, in, around, and about (our) bodies. We’ll question hierarchies between body and language and delve into times in which words and/or bodies fail or fall away. We’ll move and create together using tools from dance, theater, visual art, improvisation, somatic, and writing practices.

Readings include:

  • Renee Gladman, Calamities
  • Annie-B Parson, Dance by Letter
  • Haryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary
  • Edwin Torres, editor, The Body in Language: An Anthology
  • Adam Pendleton with Allie Biswas, In Conversation
  • Aynsley Vandenbroucke, Bodies of Silence, Parts of an Essay

Stillness

semester long course at Princeton University

In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities within stillness? In this studio course open to all, we’ll dance, sit, question, and create substantial final projects. We’ll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers’ minds. We’ll look at stillness as protest and power. We’ll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We’ll read widely within religions, philosophy, performance, disability studies, social justice, visual art, sound (and silence).

Readings include:
Edited by Joan Rothfuss, Eiko & Koma, Time Is Not Even, Space Is Not Empty
Jessica Wolf, Stillness is the Move:Coaching Dianne Wiest for ‘Happy Days’
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath
Henry Hampton, Voices of Freedom
Christina Crosby, A Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Recent Published Writing

A piece of mine, “Bodies of Silence, Parts of an Essay,” was just published by PAJ- A Journal of Performance and Art (September, 2019).  Read past that first page! The essay gets formally experimental as it goes. A lyric essay of mine, “Statement of Divorce,” was recently published in Seneca Review.

Living Gallery May 3, 2019

I’ll be sharing new work in this new series at Gibney curated by the amazing Eva Yaa Asantewaa. 7-7:30pm. Free. I got to work on this project this January at Yaddo, one of my very favorite places in the universe!

Yaddo January 16 – 30, 2019

I’ll be working on new projects in one of my favorite places in the universe! Also, I have a piece of writing in a literary journal (Seneca Review) for the first time, due out any day!  See here and here for other recent and upcoming projects.

September 11, 2018 at 7:30 (Dixon Place, NYC)

I’ll read from new performative texts for Experiments and Disorders at Dixon Place, curated by the amazing Christen Clifford and Tom Cole.

AND at Abrons Arts Center (Spring 2017)

45 minutes
For the full performance, go here: https://vimeo.com/214661570
(password: and)
Commissioned by + premiered at Abrons Arts Center, NYC
March 30-April 2, 2017
live + video content created + performed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke
production + lighting design by Nelson Downend
video + sound design by Max Bernstein
dramaturgical perspective by Lauren Bakst
performance advising by Cory Nakasue
manager- Sarah A.O. Rosner
stage manager + lighting board operating by Randi Rivera
video + sound board operating by Brent Felker
video documentation by Marin Media Lab
camera by Marin Sander Holzman and Alex Romania
edited by Marin Sander Holzman

In And, Aynsley uses literary devices to create a series of live, three-dimensional essays. She plays with lines between fact and fiction, narrative and abstraction, legibility and complexity. She works with—and against—the role of formal structures in writing, moving, and making a life.

Commissioning support for And is made possible by the Jerome Foundation. And is also made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Additional support provided by a Late Stage Stipend from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, research grants from Princeton University, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Mount Tremper Arts, and Abrons Arts Center.

Hyperallergic Review by Louis Bury
InfiniteBody Review by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Brooklyn Rail Review by Sariel Frankfurter

Culturebot Interview by Maura Donohue
Dance Enthusiast Interview by Trina Mannino

April 2018 events at Princeton University


Living at the Intersection Symposium
hosted by the Council for Science and Technology at Princeton University. Photographer Jeff Whetstone and I co-conspired on a panel about asking questions.  You can see video of a mini-performance I made for it (as well as some of our general structural ideas) here and the whole Asking Questions panel here.

 

“Teaching and Learning for People with Bodies” I taught a workshop for teachers at Princeton.  Some of what we thought about: As faculty, how do we move in the space of the classroom? How can the ways we use our bodies reflect our values as teachers and scholars? How can we use movement and space  – where (and if) we sit, how we gesture, how we arrange the room– pedagogically? How and why might we invite students to move around the classroom and take up space of their own?

July 22 + 23, 2017

AND performances at Mount Tremper Arts in the Catskill Mountains. Come for the performance, stay for the campfire! Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 3pm. Tickets here.

PAJ- A Journal of Performance and Art piece by Andrea Kleine

May 15, 2017

KLEINE: You have these very theoretical concerns in your work, and on the flip side, you practice ecstatic dance twice a week. How are those two in dialogue?
VANDENBROUCKE: When I was little, a teacher said to me, “You think too much to be a dancer.”  read more here.

Brooklyn Rail review by Sariel Frankfurter

May 1, 2017

“Someone in the audience quietly weeps. Storytelling can be so simple and yet so strangely, quietly captivating.” Read the full review here.

Uncertainty

semester long course at Princeton University

In this studio course open to all, we’ll ramble in the unknown searching for embodied philosophy, thinking art-making, and clarity that’s open for revision. As is fitting for our subject, we’ll ask many questions. Is uncertainty a requirement for truly creative processes? In cultural and creative times of uncertainty, how do we find our centers and is that even a goal? What tools can dance, somatic, and artistic practices offer for existing within uncertainty? Can uncertainty help us understand others? What are the ethical implications of uncertainty in life and art? We’ll move, read, and create together, design substantial final projects.

Readings include:
Lyn Hejinian, The Rejection of Closure
Ann Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary
Tariq Ramadan, The Problems of Being Called a Muslim Intellectual
Merce Cunningham, Space, Time and Dance
bell hooks, Postmodern Blackness
John Dewey, A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action

Reviews + Interviews, “And” premiere at Abrons Arts Center

Some beautiful reviews of the piece by Louis Bury at Hyperallergic, Eva Yaa Asantewaa on InfiniteBody, Sariel Frankfurter at The Brooklyn Rail, and Siobhan Burke at The New York Times.  Interviews with Maura Donohue on Culturebot and with Trina Mannino at The Dance Enthusiast.

Hyperallergic Review by Louis Bury

April 8, 2017

“Aynsley Vandenbroucke has been exploring the relation of literary formalism to the human body in a way few writers, if any, are doing…. In these uncertain times, one thing we can be  sure of is that a practice as original as hers will have more surprises in store for us on the other side of And’s conjunction.”  Read the full review here.

New York Times Review by Siobhan Burke

April 4, 2017

“In videos projected on the walls, she could be seen hauling that same table along a deserted country road and dancing wildly to house music, alone in her studio. No matter the task, ecstatic or mundane, she seemed to find pleasure in the effort.” Read the full review here.

Review by Eva Yaa Asantewaa on InfiniteBody

March 31, 2017

“And is autobiography bridging disciplines–visual, verbal, sonic, kinetic ones. And a bibliography; Vandenbroucke’s program notes include a long list of her recent and influential reading. (Spending an hour with a smart cookie who wears her smartness with accessible humanity and ease ain’t half-bad.)”  Read the whole piece here.

The Dance Enthusiast Interview by Trina Mannino

March 28, 2017

“Each time I approach a new work, I try to figure out what performance actually is. It can be torture. But it’s the [proverbial] banging your head on the table and figuring what it all means that really interests me.” Read the full interview here.

The New Yorker

March 24, 2017

“This thoughtful choreographer has long been as interested in words as she is in movement.”
Full listing here.

Culturebot Interview by Maura Donohue

March 23, 2017

When we met recently for a coffee, we continued to skip across and around the structure of a formal interview and instead had a great conversation about life, love, OK Cupid, misogyny, teaching, academia, Zen, Zen temple scandals, and several other things that I didn’t take notes on.See full interview here.

The New York Times

March 23, 2017

“As choreographers go, Ms. Vandenbroucke is a poetic one; to her, words are just as important as dance steps.” Listing by Gia Kourlas

And Online #2

November 3, 2016

Welcome to the 2nd installment (see 1st here) of a website experiment related to And, the performance I’m making to premiere at Abrons Arts Center March 30-April 2, 2017.  In these web pages, rehearsal, image, and writing experiments in progress alternate with excerpts from other people’s writing.  I’m interested in the ways all of this language (quoted, projected, animated, written and/or physical) can converse, offer ideas – sometimes contradictory, and create associations rather than pin down any one meaning.  I’ll post a new page like this about once a month.

Some words (in alphabetical order): actually knowing someone, aging, ambiguity, and, answers, application, art, artist, association, autobiography, beginning, body, categories, children, class, coherence, commitment, community, connection, contract, contradiction, conversation, creating, dailiness, dance, denial, depth, divorce, dominance, ecstasy, ending, energy, erotic, experience, falling apart, family, fear, female, feminism, form, friendship, generosity, hate, hierarchy, Hillary Clinton, home, honesty, House, imagination, imagination, known, language, lecture, life, lists, love, lyric essay, male, marriage, meaning, meditation, mobility, non-monogamy, not-knowing, numbers, or, organization, performance, personal essay, play, poetry, power, practice, property, questions, reality, real life, religion,  scholar, sex, solitude, Spalding Gray, stability, structure, student, submission, syllabus, teaching, text, theory, uncertainty, university, wildness, work.

“It was kind of like staying in character for a year and a half, which was incredible. But the only way that was possible was to determine that everything that I was feeling and thinking and doing [was part of that candidate character]. If I am PMS-ing today, I’m going to talk about PMS as part of my campaign. And I realized how, again, how openly female a presidential campaign had never been, because these were not the dilemmas of the bodily realities of the candidates ever.”  Eileen Myles about her Openly Female Write-In Presidential Campaign

“I am still amazed that poets insist on writing about their divorces, when robots are taking pictures of orange, ethane lakes on Titan….”  Christian Bok tweet, September 8, 2012

“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” James Baldwin in “The Creative Process”

screen-shot-2016-11-03-at-11-36-29-am

“A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending. There’s no clo­sure, it doesn’t stop.” Helene Cixous

“To think like a woman in a man’s world means… remembering that every mind resides in a body; remaining accountable to the female bodies in which we live; constantly retesting given hypotheses against lived experience. It means a constant critique of language, for as Wittgenstein (no feminist) observed, ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world.’   And it means that most difficult thing of all: listening and watching in art and literature, in the social sciences, in all the descriptions we are given of the world, for the silences, the absences, the nameless, the unspoken, the encoded- for there we will find the true knowledge of women. ” Adrienne Rich from “Taking Women Students Seriously.”

And Online #1

October 3, 2016

Welcome to the first installment of an online project related to And, the performance I’m making to premiere at Abrons Arts Center March 30-April 2, 2017 (Thursday-Saturday at 8, Sunday at 3).   And uses experimental literary devices to create a series of live, three-dimensional essays.   I’m playing with the lines between fact and fiction, narrative and abstraction, legibility and complexity, working with–and against–the roles of formal structures in writing, moving, and making a life.

In this website part of the project, my rehearsal, video, image, and writing experiments in progress alternate with excerpts from other people’s writing.  I’m interested in the ways all of this language (quoted, projected, animated, written and/or physical) can converse, offer ideas – sometimes contradictory, and create associations rather than pin down any one meaning.  I’ll post a new page like this about once a month.

Some words:  Wildness, marriage, structure, body, language, power, sex, art, dance, teaching, performance, contradiction, form, divorce, friendship, love, hate, actually knowing someone, work, play, imagination, honesty, creating, experience, meaning, application, energy, submission, meditation, feminism, Hillary Clinton, poetry, solitude, university, uncertainty, community, hierarchy, denial, scholar, artist, lists, numbers, ecstasy, not-knowing, text, imagination, children, student, class, religion, falling apart, practice, erotic, connection, personal essay, Spalding Gray, female, male, aging, ambiguity, lecture, conversation, contract, syllabus, stability, mobility, coherence, lyric essay, known, dominance, questions, answers, association, House, home, non-monogamy, family, autobiography, fear, theory, reality, beginning, ending, property, dailiness, life, generosity, categories, organization, real life, and, or, commitment, depth.


“This work is all very disobedient, in a way it picks up where Disobedience left off; but it doesn’t lecture as much or shake its fist so, is less interested in the so called real than in denying its existence in favor of the real real.” Alice Notley from “The Poetics of Disobedience” 

“Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don’t entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.” Rebecca Solnit from “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable”

“The text is a performance on a page. Text is more than a description. Text also summons a sensory experience. You know what I mean?  Words have a sound and shape. Words against other words create texture.  Words ring in your head. They command images and emotions. So in reading and writing, we experience the text in ways that are physical as well as abstract…. And writing is a continuous improvisation.” Shawn Wen interview in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay

“Somewhat typically for [Barbara] Guest (as for [John] Ashbery), the lines begin with a first-person speaker addressing the reader, but with each line that follows, that speaker leads us further and further away from the self that began, so that by the time the sentence draws to a close, we are out in the jungle with no hand to hold.  For Guest this dissolution is desirable, if sometimes melancholic; at times it is the deliverer of ecstasy.” Maggie Nelson from Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions.

screen-shot-2016-10-03-at-1-46-13-pm

“Can form make the pri­mary chaos (the raw material, the unorganized impulse and in­formation, the uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? In my opinion, the answer is yes; that is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an activity.” Lyn Hejinian from “The Rejection of Closure”

July 29, 2016

“This summer I sometimes need to dance in silence.  It gives me the space to reflect on everything going on in the world and for the dance to incorporate sobbing or stomping or shaking or deep and quiet listening.”  Aynsley Vandenbroucke quoted in New York Times article by Siobhan Burke.

The New York Times

July 29, 2016

“This summer I sometimes need to dance in silence.  It gives me the space to reflect on everything going on in the world and for the dance to incorporate sobbing or stomping or shaking or deep and quiet listening.”  Aynsley Vandenbroucke quoted in article by Siobhan Burke.

September 5 – 8, 2016

Guest teaching at Colorado College in Ryan Platt‘s Junior Seminar course.

Power, Structure, and the Human Body

semester long course at Princeton University

In this studio course open to anyone with a body, we will explore power, structure, and human bodies through personal, political, anatomical, kinesthetic, and aesthetic lenses. We will delve into these issues as artists do: by reading, thinking, talking, moving, and making performances, actions, sense, and change. Each day we will literally incorporate what we study by using tools from dance, somatic and creative practices. We will explore what it means to be an engaged intellectual. Readings include contemporary thinkers about race, gender, sexuality, disability, and performance. Students design final creative projects.

Readings include:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Letter to My Son
Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
Abigail Levine, Being a Thing: The Work of Performing in the Museum
Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip
Solmaz Sharif, Look
edited by Peter Orner, Narratives of Undocumented Lives (Voice of Witness)

May 19- June 14, 2016

Aynsley at Yaddo working on new performance.

April 18, 2016

Dear friend and mentor David Parker and his The Bang Group commend Aynsley and Laurie Berg and honor Allen Greenberg and David White at this Gala. Go to support his work.

Being and Doing: Dance for Every Body

Semester long course at Princeton

This studio course is open to everyone. We explore dance as a way to deepen both our self-knowledge and engagement with others. We delve into dance as meditation, using tools from ecstatic dance, yin yoga, and improvisation to establish a personal practice. We examine genre-bending performances occurring outside of theaters and study how dance reflects and can change (and whether it should try to change) contemporary issues, taking up such topics as power, class, race, and gender. In final creative projects, students take aspects of being and/or doing further into their own lives and communities.

Reading list includes:
Rebecca Solnit, Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable
Miguel Gutierrez, The Problem With Dancing
Anusha Kedhar, Choreography and Gesture Play an Important Role in Protests
Nato Thompson, ed, Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011
Clement Greenberg, The Case for Abstract Art

March 30- April 2, 2017

Premiere of new performance (Thurs-Sat at 8, Sun at 3) at Abrons Arts Center in NYC. Aynsley uses experimental literary devices to create a series of live, three-dimensional essays. Buy tickets here.

March 27, 2016

I’ll be a guest artist during Ana Božičević’s “Poetic Image for the People” course at BHQFU.  I’m dying a little (lot) that my current writing crush, Eileen Myles, will also be a guest during the term!

October 7, 2014

Work in progress showing at 7pm. Free.
The Chocolate Factory Theater presents THROW
curated and moderated by Sarah Maxfield.
See a sneak preview of what I’m working on

 

 

The New York Times

May 18, 2014

“From post-show barbecues to verdant vistas to thoughtful and thought-provoking art, almost everything about this festival is nourishing.  In the past seven years, Aynsley Vandenbroucke and Mathew Pokoik have transformed a few acres in the Catskills into a tranquil offshoot of the New York performance world.”

May 21 – June 23, 2014

Aynsley will be in residence at the MacDowell Colony working on a new dance.

September 29 at 3:30pm

Live Choreographing as part of Sally Silvers’ Surprise Every Time event. Many other insanely spectacular choreographers + dancers will participate. At Roulette, Brooklyn.

October 12, 2013

Counterpath Press, Denver, Colorado
Aynsley, Claudia La Rocco, and Lauren Grace Bakst grapple with the relationship between writing and dance. We’ll also guest perform/ talk at Colorado College and University of Colorado Boulder.

35 1/2 at The Chocolate Factory (May 2013)

50 minutes
The performance is structured in 5 sections (flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness) based on an ecstatic dance practice I do. This clip shows excerpts from each section.

Created by Aynsley Vandenbroucke in close collaboration with the performers and designers
Performed by Lauren Grace Bakst, Vicky Shick, Rebecca Warner
Music created and performed live by Bobby Previte
Lighting design by Nelson R. Downend, Jr.
Costume design NOT by Jenny Lai
Commissioned by and premiered May 15-18, 2013 at The Chocolate Factory Theater
Videography by Jenny and Johannes Holub

In 35 1/2, four performers grapple with opposites, which aren’t really opposites. They play with dancing + thinking, writing + reading, analyzing + immersing, performing + being. They are organized by flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness.  They are influenced by pleasure, uncreativity, excess, focus, and subtlety. Life enters in.

Additional funding provided by an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Princeton University Faculty Research Grants, and residencies at Yaddo, Mount Tremper Arts, Princeton and The Chocolate Factory.

Aynsley Vandenbroucke 35 1/2 at the Chocolate Factory Theater - Excerpts from Aynsley Vandenbroucke on Vimeo.

The Wall Street Journal

July 1, 2013

“If you can eat barbecue, you can also listen to experimental poetry. They both belong to you,” said Aynsley Vandenbroucke, the co-curator and co-founder of Mount Tremper Arts, an artist-run space on a serene 114-acre property in the Catskill Mountains. “It gives people a chance to demystify art and get to know artists.”  Read full article on Mount Tremper Arts’ Pork and Poetry event here.

July 2013

Aynsley awarded another Yaddo residency.
I’ll be cooking up some new adventures.

June 12, 2013 at 6pm

Dinner + Discussion on Writing and Dance
Hosted by Siobhan Burke with Wendy Perron,
Susan Rethorst, Emily Coates, and me
AUNTS + CLASSCLASSCLASS 

The New York Times

May 19, 2013

Their corporeal offerings are, by turn, luscious and stark; each dancer, obscured by fabric, is lost in her own world to create a scene that wavers between intimacy and cool formality…. In the past, Ms. Vandenbroucke has worked with words to create a sensory experience. (In one piece, words were typed in real time as a way to convey ideas dancing on a screen.) In “35 ½” sentences and paragraphs are shown on the wall behind the dancers, but — like the fleeting moments in any dance — disappear quickly so all you grasp is a fragment or two.  More here.

The New Yorker

May 11, 2013

In making “35½,” the smart, inquisitive choreographer surrounded herself with collaborators both a little younger (the dancers Lauren Grace Bakst and Rebecca Warner) and several decades older (the drummer Bobby Previte, the dearly admired dancer and choreographer Vicky Shick). It’s a trio about analytical thinking and sensual dance—and maybe vice versa.

The New York Times

May 10, 2013

You can’t judge a performance by its promotional photo, but the one for Ms. Vandenbroucke’s new “35 ½” gives us some intriguing hints about what she’s been up to. An index of keywords, superimposed over the image of a rubber boot-wearing dancer, suggests that everything from “radical formalism” to “Swan Lake” to “subtlest dance ever” has been on her mind. It’s worth the trip to Long Island City to see what she and her wonderful collaborators (who include the esteemed dancer-choreographer Vicky Shick) have been cooking up.

May 2013

We got an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts to help support Bobby Previte‘s performance in 35 1/2!

June 15 – Aug 24

Mount Tremper Arts Summer Festival
Contemporary Performance and Visual Arts in the Catskill Mountains

Wednesday, May 1st at 6:30pm

Untitled- After Lorca Version
Martin E. Segal Theatre
Graduate Center, CUNY
Writers, artists, and performers respond to Federico García Lorca

 

Current Collaborator Bios

Lauren Bakst (dramaturgical perspective) is an artist working in the expanded field of dance and performance practices. Her work is informed by her movements between choreographic, pedagogical, and discursive modes of thinking and making. Her collaborative projects with Yuri Masnyj have been presented by SculptureCenter, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Danspace Project, The Drawing Center, and Pioneer Works. Her work has also been presented at MANIFESTA, Pieter, the Knockdown Center, and Abrons Arts Center, among others. Lauren is the Managing Editor of the Movement Research Performance Journal. She teaches at the University of the Arts and The Cooper Union.

Max Bernstein (video and sound designer) was born and raised in Buffalo, NY where he received his BA in Media Studies from UB. Bernstein also received an MFA in Film and Studio Art from UC Boulder. In addition, he is a technical artist with the Wooster Group, media designer for guitarist Kaki King, media designer for artist Michelle Ellsworth, a member of media-based performance group Flinching Eye Collective, an associate of Friends Of The TANK :A sonic Arts Center, and drummer and video designer of the band Eupana. Bernstein’s personal works combine elements of cinema, theater, sculpture, performance, and new media, often exploring contemporary notions of representation and phenomenology through experimental narrative and technology.

Nelson Downend (lighting and production designer) is a New York City based designer, composer and writer. He received his BFA in Lighting Design from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and his career in lighting spans the fields of dance, theatre, architecture and art installation, both in the US and abroad. Nelson has worked as lighting designer for Aynsley Vandenbroucke since 2000, and as an architectural lighting designer with Domingo Gonzales Associates (2000-2006) and Lumen Architecture (2006-2011). Nelson enjoys working at the intersection of lighting, film and music, combing his three passions under the Ambershift Media banner.

Cory Nakasue (performance advisor) is a writer and theater/new media artist. Over the past 20 years she’s performed and devised with artists that include Serge Bennathan, Mark Murphy, and her own group SPINE. She runs Body Intelligence, a service that provides movement education and therapy through NYU Medical Center and independently. She advises groups and individuals on using movement applications to address psychology, neurology, and performance. She will be reading from her latest collection of poetry next month at Station independent Gallery, and has a regular astrology column slated to debut in Upstater Magazine this summer.

Sarah A.O. Rosner (managing director) hustles maximalism. She is a multimedia performance maker (the A.O. Movement Collective), arts businessperson (A.O. PRO(+ductions)), and postmodern pornographer (AORTA films) who makes work out of Brooklyn, NY. She currently serves as a Managing Consultant for Tere O’Connor Dance and Company SBB / Stefanie Batten Bland, and the Managing Director for Juliana May and Aynsley Vandenbroucke, as well as offering freelance arts business consulting for NYC’s makers. Mx. Rosner has been featured as a speaker, educator, and panelist by Kickstarter, Adobe, Dance NYC, Gibney Dance, Dance Theater Workshop/New York Live Arts, CLASS CLASS CLASS, and Dance New Amsterdam, as well as Marymount Manhattan, Sarah Lawrence, Bard, and Purchase Colleges.  www.theAOMC.org // www.AORTAfilms.com

Untitled Written Dance Outdoor Rooftop Version (May 2011)

12 minutes

This is Version (#2) of Untitled, performed outside on a rooftop at Rooftop DanceUntitled is a written dance which first premiered at Danspace Project, NYC.  The piece shifts tremendously depending on the location.  The core elements are live typed, projected, moving language and ideas related to place, dance and the changing nature of things.  Historic dance forms and performances make brief virtual appearances.  Created by Aynsley Vandenbroucke.  This version is performed by Gudbjorg Arnalds, Liz Sargent, Aynsley Vandenbroucke, and Kristen Warnick.

Other versions of Untitled:
Princeton University CIRC discussion, 10/12
One Arm Red PowerPoint Version, 5/12
Danspace Project Excerpts

Made possible, in part, by the Danspace Project 2010-2011 Commissioning Initiative, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as Production Residencies at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of CW2

Friday, February 8, 2013

Dance at Roulette, Brooklyn
We’ll be showing very new work
Jenny Liu and Jillian Sweeney also perform

October 11 + December 10, 2012 at 6:30pm

Pizza & Process
CIRC Artist in Residence program

Princeton University

May 15-18, 2013

New York City
premiere of 35 1/2
Wed, May 15- Sat, May 18, 8pm
The Chocolate Factory

Aynsley wins Art + Action Award

“The Art + Action Award annually recognizes an extraordinary artist who is also committed to taking action on behalf of the dance field or broader community. Gibney Dance is honored to present the 2012 Art + Action Award to Aynsley Vandenbroucke.” May 10, 2012 more info

August 2012

Aynsley in residence at Yaddo for two weeks
Working on new evening-length piece to premiere May 2013 in NYC.

May 8, 2012

Aynsley shows new work in progress at One Arm Red, Dumbo NYC

Contribute

Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group depends on support from individuals like you. 

Your contributions are used to pay artists and collaborators, rehearsal spaces and publicity.  If you would like to make a contribution, any amount helps. $15 pays to rent rehearsal space for one hour, $2000 pays for lighting design for one performance season.

To make a donation online, go here: https://newyorklivearts.secure.force.com/donate/?dfId=a0n3100000BhO8RAAV

Or write a check to our fiscal sponsor, New York Live Arts, Inc. and write “member project of Aynsley Vandenbroucke” in the memo. Mail the check to Aynsley Vandenbroucke 173 Avenue A #14, New York, NY 10009.

Aynsley Vandenbroucke is a member artist of New York Live Arts, Inc., a non-profit tax-exempt organization.  Contributions in support of Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s work are greatly appreciated and may be made payable to New York Live Arts, Inc., earmarked for “the New York Live Arts member project of Aynsley Vandenbroucke.” A description of the work and current project activities for which such contributions will be used are available from Aynsley Vandenbroucke or New York Live Arts, upon request.  All contributions are fully deductible to the extent allowed by the law. (Note: A copy of New York Live Arts’ latest annual financial report filed with the New York State Department of State may be obtained by writing to the N.Y.S. Dept. of State, Charities Registration, 162 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12231, or to New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011)

Thank you!

What is Laban Movement Analysis?

Aynsley’s teaching is heavily influenced by Laban Movement Analysis. So what exactly is it?

LMA is a system for observing, describing, notating, and delving deeply into movement. First developed by Rudolf Laban in the early 1900s and best known for its notation system, it has continued to be deepened by anthropologists, choreographers, actors, physical therapists, psychologists, dancers, and political consultants, among others. Choreographers Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss, Hanya Holm, Pina Bausch, and William Forsythe descend from Laban’s work as did Robert Ellis Dunn, the influential teacher who helped birth Judson Dance Theater.  A holistic system, LMA recognizes that the way we move both reflects and influences the way we live our lives. It is used to strengthen and clarify the work of professional movers (athletes, dancers) and is also used to offer insight and movement choices to people in their daily lives.

Choreography

Semester-long course taught at Princeton University.

Course Description:
Designed for students with some previous experience in dance, this composition course is combined with your technique course in order to simultaneously explore the creative, analytical, historical, and technical aspects of dance, recognizing that a creative approach to any field requires an integrated and intelligent mind and body.  This Friday class will include short warm –up movement explorations related to our studies as well as a lab atmosphere of creative inquiry.  Students will develop a range of tools for creative problem solving in general, and choreography in particular.

Course Objectives:
By the end of the course, students will be able to:

Move, create, watch, and discuss movement with confidence, creativity, and clarity.

Go into a studio alone and work creatively with freedom, ease, and a toolbag full of possibilities.

Face the inevitable fear and unknowing of creativity with calm acknowledgement, and work anyways.

Have a taste of the breadth of the contemporary dance field, possible directions for your own work and further viewing.

Apply tools from this class to other fields.

 

Introduction to Laban Movement Analysis

Semester long course taught at Lehman College.  Can also be offered as a workshop.

Somatics II introduces Laban Movement Analysis as a tool for understanding human movement. Students will gain insight into their own movement preferences as well as precise tools for observing and describing the movement of others. The class will be a mixture of moving, observing, writing, reading, and discussing.   Laban Movement Analysis is a system that supports, and is influenced by, a wide range of fields including dance, theater, sports, politics, and psychology. The class will emphasize movement as an integration of body and mind, drawing on these varied fields at the same time that it invites students into a deeper relationship with their own bodies.

Introduction to Movement and Dance

Semester-long course taught at Princeton University

Designed for people with little or no previous training in dance, this class is a mixture of movement techniques, improvisation, choreography, observing, writing and discussing. Using tools from Laban Movement Analysis, students investigate their own movement patterns and delve into many facets of dance and the cultural questions surrounding it. We explore the role of dancer, choreographer, audience member, and critic in relation to such topics as aesthetic questions, politics, identity, religion, and complex views of the human body. We also look at movement and embodiment in our daily lives.

Reading list includes:
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
Claudia La Rocco, Funny, You Don’t Look Dancerish
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body
John McPhee, Structure: Beyond the Picnic Table Crisis
John Simon, The Boo Taboo
Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

 

November 13, 2011

Aynsley Curates Kinetic Cinema

Select Performance History (2006-2011)


May 21, 2011

Aynsley premieres new short work at RoofTop Dance.

March 17-19, 2011
Premiere of Untitled at Danspace Project

September-October, 2010
Participant in The Adventure, a gathering of dance makers and thinkers about dance as part of the Danspace Project platform curated by Trajal Harrell

Tuesday, September 28
Lecture / Demonstration at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO.

Thurs-Sun, Nov 4-7
Aynsley shows work in progress at Soaking WET, West End Theater, NYC

Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Work in progress showing
THROW, curated by Sarah Maxfield
The Chocolate Factory

July 10 – August 15, 2010
Mount Tremper Arts Summer Festival

Friday, August 6, 2010 from 7pm
Aynsley and Cory Nakasue challenge each other to a choreographic duel as part of Food for the Arts Friday Night BBQs at The Mount Tremper Arts Summer Festival Catskill Mountains, NY

December 9, 2008
AVMG shows work in progress at Dance Conversations at the Flea.New York, NY.

November 15, 2008
Aynsley hosts a round table discussion on the role of Laban Movement Analysis in contemporary choreography at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute’s BEYOND BODY LANGUAGE SYMPOSIUM, NYC.

October 8, 2008
AVMG performs at Movement Research’s Open Performance, NYC.

July 26, 2008
AVMG performs Full Circle at the inaugural Mount Tremper Arts Festival, Mount Tremper, NY.

May 29, 2008
AVMG performs at Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

April 23-28, 2008
AVMG performs and teaches in Sao Paulo and at the Centro Coreografico do Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

April 12-13, 2008
AVMG performs Full Circle at Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC.

April 8, 2008
AVMG shows new work in progress at Dance Conversations At The Flea , NYC.

January 2008
Excerpts from And How Should I Begin? performed at APAP, NYC.

October 2007
Work in progress performed as part of Crossing Boundaries at Dixon Place, NYC.

September 2007
Excerpts from And How Should I Begin? performed at Dancenow/NYC Festival, NYC.

April 2007
And How Should I Begin? performed at Mt. Tremper Arts, Mt. Tremper, New York.

April 2007
And How Should I Begin? premiered at Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC.

January 2007
Excerpts from Full Circle performed at APAP, NYC.

November 2006
Full Circle performed at The Brooklyn Museum, NYC.

September 2006
Excerpts from Full Circle performed at Dancenow/NYC Festival, NYC.

April 2006
Full Circle premiered at Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC.

Untitled Written Dance Danspace (March 2011)

30 minutes
Created and performed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke in collaboration with Brian Rogers
Music by Mike Rugnetta and Frederic Chopin
Lighting Design by Carol Mullins
Videography by Jenny Holub
Commissioned by Danspace Project, NYC
Part of PLATFORM 2011: Body Madness
Part II: Rhythm & Humor curated by David Parker

Untitled is a written dance. It plays with the choreography of words, the movement of ideas. Aynsley tries to come to terms with the big gaping why of entering a studio alone to make a dance. Questions are plentiful. Answers not so much. “Thoughts about dance and our relationship to art are gently, poetically presented.” Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times.

Made possible, in part, by the Danspace Project 2010-2011 Commissioning Initiative, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as Production Residencies at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of CW2

A Number of Small Black and White Dances (2009)

50 minutes
Choreographed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke with the performers
Performed by Gudbjorg Halla Arnalds, Cheri Paige Fogleman, Djamila Moore, Aynsley Vandenbroucke, and Kristen Warnick
Music Composed by Mike Rugnetta
Lighting Design and Word Animation by Nelson R. Downend, Jr.
Line Animation by Myra Margolin
Costumes by Liz Sargent
Videography by Johannes Holub ( at Dance New Amsterdam, NYC )
Additional Video: end excerpt and full dance

A Number of Small Black and White Dances “builds off repertory from the past eight years. Fragments of pre-existing dances rub edges like the pieces of white paper (some with words like ‘touch’ and ‘begin’ printed on them) arranged and then strewn across the stage.This is no highlights program, but a tender reimagining of the past, and a sophisticated rumination on how an ephemeral art form can survive while staying true to its fragile, mutable essence.” Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times

A Number of Small Black and White Dances was commissioned by Dance New Amsterdam and was created with support from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund.

3 Dancers, 4 Chairs, 26 Words (2009)

50 minutes
Choreographed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke with the performers
Performed by Djamila Moore, K. Tanzer, and Kristen Warnick
Lighting Design by Nelson R. Downend, Jr.
Costumes by Liz Sargent
Videography by Jenny Holub
(premiered and filmed at CPR- Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, NY )

Formal and stark, 3 Dancers, 4 Chairs, 26 Words unravels the language of movement, symbols and words. Growing out of just 26 words, the piece asks if a dance with text can retain the open and direct nature of pure movement. Can words be abstract? How do choreographic structures change sentences and sounds? How does grammar affect movement? How do words move? Finally, what are those aspects of human experience that cannot be pinned down and named?

Experiment with Dancer and Lines (Video 2008, Created in 2005)

3 minutes
Dancing by Aynsley Vandenbroucke
Animation by Myra Margolin
Music by J.S. Bach (The Well Tempered Clavier performed by Glenn Gould)
Videography by Mathew Pokoik
(filmed at Mt. Tremper Arts)

Experiment with Dancer and Lines is a collaborative journey between one dancer and a number of life-sized animated lines. The projected, minimal lines reveal the dancer, partner with her, and ultimately transform into stars falling around her.

And How Should I Begin? (2007)

50 minutes
Choreographed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke with the performers
Performed by Djamila Moore, Dawn Springer, Kristen Warnick
Sound Design by Geoff Gersh
Lighting Design by Nelson R. Downend, Jr.
Costumes by Liz Sargent
Videography by Jenny Holub
(filmed at Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC)

Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, this piece is a journey through the world of human connections and missed connections. Made up of many short vignettes, it is a conversation between poetry and movement.
Link to another video clip here.

April 7, 2012 at 8pm

New Work in Progress Showing
Studio A.I.R.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Full Circle (2006)

46 minutes
Choreographed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke with the performers
Performed by Cheri Paige Fogleman, Djamila Moore, Aynsley Vandenbroucke, Kristen Warnick, and Molly Wilson
Live viola and electric boomerang by Leanne Darling
Live percussion by John Wieczorek
Light Consultation by Nelson R. Downend, Jr.
Costumes by Naoko Nagata
Videography and Editing by Jenny Holub
(filmed at Mt. Tremper Arts and Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYC)

Lit entirely by flashlights and performed with only one row of audience members arranged in a circle surrounding the performers, Full Circle plays with perception and investigates community, circles, cycles, and light. A highly original event, Full Circle works well in non-traditional spaces, inside or out.

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August 6, 2011

Untitled
performance as part of the Mount Tremper Arts Summer Festival Pork and Poetry Weekend

Teaching Philosophy

I am obsessed with the roles of movement and embodiment in every aspect of life.  I see dance as a field in which we look at the most fundamental and pressing human questions through our bodies.  I think of improvisational dance and somatic practices as secret (not so secret) ways to support students as they find their own centers, their own grounding, empathy, and continued curiosity about the world around them.

I love the conversations about sometimes difficult and sensitive topics that flow more fully and truthfully after people have rolled around on the floor, been silly and sweaty together.

I nurture thinking, creative, opinionated young people.   I help budding artists, movers, and engaged intellectuals find a sense of their own skills and questions and tools for developing further.  I believe that learning to move and learning to create impact every aspect of life, that teaching dance is a political act.  That standing up for the human body as a primary source of information and change is necessary.

I teach at Princeton University where I’ve been since 2011.  I previously taught at Lehman College in the Bronx for three years.  I spent five years teaching and assistant coordinating for the graduate-level Certificate Program at the Laban/ Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies.  I’ve also taught workshops for ClassClassClass, courses for students ages 4-80, master classes in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and substitute taught for pre-professional students at North Carolina School of the Arts.

March 20, 2012 at 7pm

An Evening with Ugly Duckling Presse at The Kitchen
Ugly Duckling Presse presents the inaugural edition of Emergency INDEX. This annual print publication features descriptions of new performance in the words of its creators (including Aynsley!)

June 9-August 11, 2012

The Mount Tremper Arts Festival!
Contemporary performing and visual arts in the Catskill Mountains.

Below The Skin (2004)

48 minutes
Choreographed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke with the performers
Performed by Cheri Paige Fogleman, Janice Lancaster, and Dawn Springer
Live viola and electric boomerang by Leanne Darling
Lighting Design by Nelson R. Downend, Jr.
Costumes by Naoko Nagata
Videography by Jenny Holub
(filmed at Lincoln Center Institute’s Clark Studio Theater, NYC)

Below The Skin is a multifaceted movement and music exploration of the question “What is it to give everything?” The dancers and musician ask: What is it to give your all in rehearsal, in performance, in rest, in work and in play, physically, emotionally, honestly?

After Fall (2002)

35 minutes
Choreographed by Aynsley Vandenbroucke with the performers.
This duet performed by Liza Domnitz and Dawn Springer.
Entire piece performed by Caroline Adams, Kim Craigie, Liza Domnitz, Cheri Paige Fogleman, Janice Lancaster, Djamila Moore, Dawn Springer, and Molly Wilson.
Music by Ensemble Venance Fortunat and Schola Cantorum Coloniensis.
Lighting by Nelson R. Downend, Jr.
Costumes by Naoko Nagata.
Videography by Jenny Holub
(filmed at Lincoln Center Institute’s Clark Studio Theater, NYC)
Link to another video clip here.

After Fall is a quiet and contemplative piece that grew out of the time surrounding September 2001. The movement is understated, panning between intimate duets and sculptural ensemble work. Exploring resilience, subtlety, and the relationships between religion and dance, it is a piece that invites the audience into introspection and silence.

Past Collaborator Bios

Gudbjorg Halla Arnalds (performer) grew up in Reykjavík, Iceland, where she began studying at the Icelandic National Ballet School. In New York Gudbjorg has performed with Daniel Charon and Helen Simoneau as well as being a company member of VIA Dance Collaborative for several seasons. Gudbjorg was awarded the Kenan Fellowship at Lincoln Center Institute in 2007 which allowed her to further her choreographic endeavors. She has performed her own work in several venues in New York and her evening length work Casa Susanna (a collaboration with composer Justin Pointdexter) was performed at the Clark Theater. Gudbjorg holds a B.F.A in modern Dance from North Carolina School of the Arts and continues to enjoy teaching Pilates to the fine folks in Brooklyn Heights.

Leanne Darling (violist/composer) has appeared with virtuoso oudist Simon Shaheen in Carnegie Hall, with poets Robert Bly and Clarissa Pinkola-Estes at the Omega Institute, and with the Cedar Lake Ensemble’s premiere performance in Chelsea. Her work on Toy Box Theatre’s “The Landlord” earned her the Best Original Music award from the New York Innovative Theater Awards in 2007. She has worked with choreographers Jodie Gates and Ann Robideaux. A classicaly trained violist, Darling now specializes in Arabic music, jazz, blues and composes her own repertoire for solo viola and loops. The CD release party for her debut album, “Spiral” will take place June 6 at the Brooklyn Conservatory.

Cheri Paige Fogleman (performer) holds a BFA from North Carolina School of the Arts. She was a founding dancer in Shen Wei Dance Arts, performing at the American Dance Festival, The Kennedy Center and Switzerland’s STEPS Dance Festival. Cheri was the recipient of the Terry Sanford Scholarship at the American Dance Festival in 2000. In New York, Cheri has been seen dancing with VIA Dance Collaborative, Maryanne Chaney, Alethea Adsitt, Emily Tschiffely, and Aynsley Vandenbroucke. She is also persuing acting (having completed a two year Meisner technique program at the Maggie Flanigan Studio) and has just been cast as a lead in an indi feature film, Deus Ex, to begin filming in Philadelphia, May 2008.

Geoff Gersh (Guitarist/Composer) explores the sonic boundaries of the electric guitar with and without the aide of electronic devices and found objects. He performs with various bands in and around the NYC area that range in styles from singer/songwriters to ambient/improv/experimental groups. Geoff has composed music for installations by painter David Stoupakis that have been shown at galleries in Los Angeles. He has worked with choreographers Robert LaFosse, Cynthia Oliver, Karen Graham, Lawrence Goldhuber and Benoit-Swan Pouffer. In May of 2005 Geoff spent a month in Greece & Germany working with composer Jonathan Bepler on video artist Eve Sussman’s new piece, The Rape of the Sabine Women, which was premiered in NYC in February 2007. In 1999, Geoff had the opportunity to study the shamisen with Kiharu Nakamura for 2 years and appeared on Japanese TV with her multiple times. Currently, Geoff is the full time zither player for the Off-Broadway production Blue Man Group in NYC and has performed for the Chicago and Las Vegas shows as well. Geoff has received grants from Meet the Composer, American Music Center, New York Foundation for the Arts and a Bessie Award for his collaborative score for Cynthia Oliver’s SHEMAD.

Designer Jenny Lai heads an experimental studio called NOT that combines artistry and function to create a living wardrobe. She designs both a ready-to-wear line – for those that perform daily- and custom performance wear – for those that perform on stage. Prior to starting her own brand, Jenny strove to experience design from all different angles of the industry. She studied traditional artisans’ techniques in Mexico city, designed jewelry in Rwanda for a women’s cooperative, and apprenticed with Viktor & Rolf in Amsterdam and Boudicca in London. www.notaligne.com

Djamila Moore (performer) grew up in Kohala, Hawaii where her first dance training was in Hula. She received her BFA in Contemporary Dance from North Carolina School of the Arts. She has studied and performed at the American Dance Festival and Impulstanz in Vienna, Austria. Djamila is a founding member of VIA Dance Collaborative and was a company member of AMDaT. Currently she also collaborates and performs with Liz Sargent. By day she is a teacher of three year olds and is also working towards a degree in Landscape Architecture. This is her fifth season performing with AVMG.

Naoko Nagata (costume designer) has established herself as one of the industries most versatile and unique costume designers. She has collaborated with an impressive list of talent, including David Dorfman Dance, David Neumann, Doug Elkins Dance Company, Bebe Miller, Zvi Gotheiner and Dancers, Jeanette Stoner, Amos Pinhasi, Jeanine Durning, Sara Pearson and Patrick Widrig and Dancers, Cherlyn Lavagnino, Janis Brenner, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Nina Winthrope, Hetty King, Diversions in the United Kingdom, Mollie O’Brien, Nami Yamamoto, Curt Haworth and Karl Anderson among many, many others. Her background is biochemistry. What changed her life is a long story. Nowadays, her laboratory is a rehearsal studio.

Mathew Pokoik (company photographer) is a photographer, curator, educator, and arts administrator. He is the co-director, with Aynsley Vandenbroucke, of Mt. Tremper Arts. Since 1999 Mathew has been a Teaching Artist with Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education where he teaches Aesthetic Education. He is a member of LCI’s Collaborative where he conducts professional development for classroom teachers and has taught Aesthetics at numerous colleges including Queens College, SUNY New Paltz, Bank Street College, St. John’s University, and CCNY. He lectures at many museums around the NY area, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the International Center of Photography among others. In 2001, two portfolios of his photographs joined Lincoln Center Institute’s repertory in the visual arts, and since have been studied at schools and universities throughout the New York Metropolitan area. Mathew received a B.A. in photography from Bard College, where he studied with Stephen Shore. He also studied privately with Frederick Sommer.

Bobby Previte  is a performer/composer whose work explores the nexus between composed and improvised music. One of the seminal figures of the 80s “Downtown” scene, his music has been labeled as “utterly original,” by the New York Times, while The New Yorker says his ensembles “speak in visionary tongues,” and the Village Voice calls him “a serious composer with the heart of a roadhouse rocker.” Leading a plethora of diverse ensembles from his instrument, the drums, he travels constantly, presenting his music at clubs, concert halls, and festivals with musicians from around the world. He has collaborated with many of the leading lights in and beyond the world of music – from master composer John Adams to rock icon Tom Waits to the legendary filmmaker Robert Altman. bobbyprevite.com

Vicky Shick has been involved with the New York dance community for over three decades as performer, choreographer and teacher. During her six years with the Trisha Brown Company she received a “Bessie” for performance. She has also worked and collaborated  with many other performers and choreographers. In NYC , Shick teaches at Hunter College, for the Trisha Brown Company and for Movement Research. She is a 2006 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2008-9 Guggenheim Fellow.

Liz Sargent (costume designer) works as a designer, administrator and director. As a costume designer Liz has worked with AVMG, Djamila Moore’s garden pieces and Daniel Charon among others. Liz’s performance installations have been produced by Danspace Project City/Dans, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Sitelines, Dance Theatre Workshop’s 40th Anniversary and at The Chocolate Factory. Her new piece will be shown at Chez Bushwick’s CAKE on June 27th. Liz is also designing with Zack Morris for an artistic haunted house at Abrons Art Center. LizSargent.com.

K. Tanzer (performer) is an interdisciplinary theatre-maker and director who has been creating original theatre for ensembles since 1994. In 1996, she founded Collision Theory, an award winning interdisciplinary performance company, and served as co-Artistic Director until 2005. Currently, Tanzer is the Director for Exhibit A Performance Group, which she co-founded in 2006. Exhibit A recently premiered Lock 10 with MacArthur Fellow Ken Vandermark. It was adapted from Kathy Hendrickson’s play Lock 10, and presented by Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. Tanzer is currently developing an untitled multi-media performance piece in collaboration with fiction writer, and long-time collaborator, Patricia Eakins. In addition to her artistic work, Tanzer teaches at The New Actors Workshop and the Laban Institute of Movement Studies, among other institutions and organizations. She is also a Certified Movement Analyst.

Rebecca Warner (performer) grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. She graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia with a BA in Neuroscience. She dances with RoseAnne Spradlin, Beth Gill, Stacy Grossfield, Aynsley Vandenbroucke, Karen Harvey and Megan Byrne. She has performed with Sarah Michelson, Deganit Shemy, Neta Pulvermacher, Muna Tseng, Mark Morris, the Metropolitan Opera, Diana Crum and Buck Wanner. She sings with We Are Your Friends (a capella group) and choreographed a story ballet for the National Yiddish Theatre. Her work has been shown at the 2011 Meredith Monk Benefit, La MaMa Moves Festival, CATCH, and Movement Research at the Judson Church.

Kristen Warnick (performer) has been working with AVMG since 2005. She earned her BA in Dance and Anthropology from the University of Oregon in 2002. In the year following, she danced with Margo Van Ummersen Dance Company in Eugene, OR. In May 2005, she became a Certified Movement Analyst from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. She will graduate as a Licensed Massage Therapist from the Swedish Institute this August.

John Wieczorek (percussionist) has been playing and studying various styles of contemporary, ethnic and electronic percussion for the last 30 years. He’s fortunate to have performed w/ the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, Bassists Gary Peacock & Mark Dresser, Bansuri Flutist Steve Gorn, Tablaji Pandit Samir Chatterjee, Layne Redmond’s “Mob of Angels”, Saxaphonists Joe McPhee & David Rothenberg and the Epiphany Project.

Artist’s Statement

I make performances, experiences, language, objects, and ideas. These sometimes look like: a dance, an animation, an essay, a university course, a new performance space. I’m obsessed with the moments in which seemingly unrelated fields and ways of being in the world meet. I’m passionate about the movement of ideas, the choreography of language, the intelligence of bodies, the ways formal constraints open up possibilities, and the ways all of these invite us to grapple with fundamental human questions. I make and teach and share art because it offers practice in being in the unknown – in ambiguity, in questions, in imagination, in creating something from nothing, in grappling with gaps in communication, and, sometimes, in moments of thrilling presence. I care about complexity and questions for which there are no answers, time spent with other human beings learning about ourselves, and, hopefully, each other.

Aynsley Vandenbroucke Bio

Called “gifted” by the New Yorker and “an elegant, sensitive thinker” by The New York Times, Aynsley Vandenbroucke has been creating dance in New York City since 2000.  Her work has been performed throughout the city (at the Chocolate Factory, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Danspace Project, CPR- Center for Performance Research, Dixon Place, Dance New Amsterdam, and Lincoln Center Institute’s Clark Studio Theater, among others) as well as in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Colorado, and Brazil.  She received the 2012 “Art & Action” award from Gibney Dance Center recognizing “an extraordinary artist who is also committed to taking action on behalf of the dance field.”  She was a 2014 fellow at The MacDowell Colony and in residence at Yaddo in 2012, 2013, and 2016. Her work has been supported by The Jerome Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, LMCC, The Mertz Gilmore Foundation, and an emergency grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.  Aynsley’s newest performance, And, will premiere at Abrons Arts Center March 30-April 2, 2017.

Aynsley and photographer Mathew Pokoik founded Mount Tremper Arts, a center for contemporary performance and visual art in the Catskill Mountains.  There she played a large role in the design and building of the studio performance space and served as artistic director and then co-curator until 2014. Mount Tremper Arts has been noted in ArtForum.com, The New York Times, The New Yorker and many others.

Aynsley has taught at Princeton University since 2011. There she has developed innovative courses at the intersections of dance, somatics, philosophy, and writing and has helped foster collaboration across arts disciplines.  A Laban Movement Analyst, she was on the faculty of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies for five years where she also helped coordinate the yearlong graduate level certificate program.

Her writing on dance has been published in The Performance Club, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMBlog, and Movement Research Performance Journal. As a dancer she has worked with Liz Sargent Installations and jill sigman/ thinkdance. She graduated in 1999 from North Carolina School of the Arts where she studied on scholarship and was nominated for the Princess Grace Award. Her previous studies included intensive ballet and contemporary dance training at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio and The Alvin Ailey American Dance Center in New York, ImpulsTanz in Vienna, The Ruth Page Foundation and Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago.

 

 

artforum.com 500 Words

July 28, 2011

We often say that Mount Tremper Arts is an antidote to the global art industry. It’s like summer camp for artists: from the intimate size of the space to the seven-week length of the festival, as well as the communal meals, the relaxed pace, the beautiful environment. We wanted to build a place where artists, like us, could make rigorous work in an intensive yet informal setting… Read More  here.

An Imaginary Education in the History of Written Dances

July 15, 2011

Published in The Brooklyn Rail (July- August 2011)

George Balanchine would type in black and white. The words would be classical with modern, jazzy moments, all laid out in a symmetrical fashion. The letters would be very thin.

Martha Graham’s written dance would be filled with, ahem, contractions.

Let’s look up, sob.
Don’t!
Won’t!
Can’t!
She’ll fall.
She’ll roll.
She’ll strike a leg o’er the air.

Merce Cunningham’s written dance would be a wide open field of words, nothing more important than others. The words would be picked by chance and new words would be made by combining independent letters. It would be virtuosic, which I have yet to figure out, and it might look a bit like John Cage’s writing.

Yvonne Rainer, during the time of Trio A, might have made a written dance with no involvement of the writer and reader, no capitalization, no punctuation.

step off the curb move jump um turn stand on one leg spin stand on one leg sit move use a yeah word don’t look do look um breathe stand right arm um forward flow stop begin stand turn one leg to side one arm to side or use the

 

Steve Paxton:

 

And Pina Bausch might have included writing in this new spectacle made in a foreign country. I give you the press release.

For Immediate Release:
March 21, noon.
Pina Bausch presents the premiere of Rite of Spring in the South Pole.
One stage covered in ice two miles deep, 15 female dancers in thin slip dresses, 25 penguins, 150 falls—including the sun which will be setting for the last time until it rises again in September.

The New York Times

March 18, 2011

 ‘I’m obsessed with the movement of ideas and the choreography of language,’ types Aynsley Vandenbroucke, her words projected on a screen. Those thoughts pervade ‘Untitled,’ a piece in which no one dances, but thoughts about dance and our relationship to art are gently, poetically, presented.
Read the full review of recent Danspace Project Performance here.

Danspace Project Blog

March 17, 2011

Its staging is simple: a series of written dialogues between Vandenbroucke and her past, Vandenbroucke and her present, and Vandenbroucke and her artistic collaborator, Brian Rogers. These dialogues range from the mundane (the experience of making a dance), to the personal (experiences of personal failures, frustrations, childhood memories, artistic influences), to the philosophical (what it means to begin and/or end something, why things (dances) matter). read more here.

The New York Times

October 21, 2010

A group of New York City-based artists who have worked together in a choreographic laboratory led by Trajal Harrell (the current curator of the Danspace platform, “certain difficulties, certain joy”) present a one-off performance. What it is remains mysterious, but the artists involved are a terrific group, with Will Rawls, Brennan Gerard, Ryan Kelly and Aynsley Vandenbroucke among them.

The Brooklyn Rail

September 20, 2010

Public performance is one thing, but this location is built to feed artists and once you’ve seen it, it becomes clear that there’s nothing more important than a space where life and art aren’t ever at odds, all creative work is valued, and the true currency exchange is in ideas. Read the rest of this article by Patricia Milder here.

The New York Times

December 12, 2009

A Number of Small Black and White Dances is a “tender reimagining of the past, and a sophisticated rumination on how an ephemeral art form can survive while staying true to its fragile, mutable essence.” Read More

danceviewtimes

December 10, 2009

The choreographer has a sharp eye for psychology.  On a half-lit stage, Djamila Moore lay on the floor curled as if in sleep.  Kristen Warnick took a cord and created an outline around Moore, like a police crime scene.  Then she curled up and lay beside her.  Moore noticed the intrusion.  She got up, moved a few feet away and reassumed her position, alone again.  It was an understated moment, perfectly observed. Read more here.

New York Press

December 9, 2009

“An inquisitive, rigorous process lies behind each of Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s dance works…. She creates meticulously distilled pieces in which she scrupulously avoids falling back on movement that is learned or familiar.” Read More

Culturebot

December 8, 2009

I remember dancing in the aisles of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion during intermission at around age 5. Pretty shortly after that I decided I was going to move to New York when I was an adult. While my friends drew pictures of houses and picket fences, I drew modern high-rise apartments. I now divide my time between NYC, where most of my teaching and choreographing takes place, and the Catskill Mountains, where my husband and I run a center for contemporary performance and visual arts, Mount Tremper Arts. Read the rest here.

The New York Times

December 6, 2009

*In a variation on the idea of repertory (and perhaps an ode to Merce Cunningham’s Events?), Ms. Vandenbroucke is culling from her almost decade of making dances to create a new work, “A Number of Small Black and White Dances.” Here’s to recycling! If her past efforts are any indication, this should be an evening of thoughtful, surprising delicacy.

The New Yorker

May 31, 2009
“An investigation into the relative abstractions of movement and verbal language, it’s a kind of cross between refrigerator-magnet poetry and musical chairs. Since the twenty-six words include man,woman,and child, along with sea, grave, and flying, a story keeps coalescing. The word touch shouldn’t necessarily turn the story into one of longing, but it does.”
 

The New York Times

May 15, 2009

There is a certain appealing simplicity about Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s “3 Dancers, 4 Chairs, 26 Words,” which opened on Thursday night….For the most part, the women don’t dance in any traditional sense of the word. Ms. Vandenbroucke creates clear, pared-down movement, walking and turning, gestures to the side, a hand to the face, that works well with the allusive, associative piece, lighted with shadowy care (and huge Kara Walker-like shadows) by Nelson R. Downend Jr. ‘3 Dancers ‘ is modest in its aims. But it has an integrity that many grander projects don’t achieve. read more

The New York Times

May 15, 2009

Aynsley Vandenbroucke is an elegant, sensitive thinker.

The Village Voice

May 13, 2009

As curator and choreographer, Vandenbroucke craves formal exploration. After graduating from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, she briefly quit dance, unable to find meaning in questions like, “How high can your leg go?” Eventually, like many before her, she discovered ways of addressing other questions, lately through verbal means—one piece using “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” another teasing stories out of 26 scrambled words. Read more here.

WAMC 51% Interview

June 26, 2008

Today we introduce you to a dancer with a difference. Aynsley Vandenbrouke, dancer, choreographer and founder of the Mount Tremper Arts in New York’s Catskills…was told by her teachers that she thinks too much to be a dancer. She’s rebelled against the rules that make dancers obedient robots with perfect technique. Her work combines thought with everyday motion. Listen Here.

Audience Member

June 20, 2008

It’s like moving philosophy.

Attitude The Dancer’s Magazine

Vandenbroucke’s seamless and sensory integrated gathering ended my overflowing New York day. Sitting with strangers looking across to each other in the darkened space, listening carefully to sparks of live sound, the evening provided what Eric Hawkins used to call immediacy.

Attitude, The Dancer’s Magazine

June 15, 2007

Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group’s “And How Should I Begin?” borrows heavily from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” while being a wholly imaginative visual poem of its own. Her work shows thoughtfulness, dedication and pluck. [The piece] asks a simple question, answers with a wealth of variations, and leaves a lot of room for the viewer to also ask, and how should I begin? No matter how, just get started.

The New Yorker

April 26, 2007

In her new trio “And How Should I Begin?,” the gifted young choreographer struggles with T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The poem is both muttered sotto voce and recited outright, and Vandenbroucke draws upon its teacups, sprawled bodies, magic lanterns, and mermaids riding the waves. Yet the dance, measured out in super-brief vignettes, is strongest when it treats the poem’s melancholy obliquely, using photocopies of the poem to wall off or connect the dancers.

Litkicks.com

April 23, 2007

…I found the experience dazzling.link here for article and interview related to “And How Should I Begin?”

The Village Voice

September 20, 2006

The hazards in a mysterious, quite intriguing excerpt from Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s “Full Circle” are more playful in nature. To live music by Leanne Darling, and in near total darkness, two women in white train flashlights on two others-making them jump-rope over beams, penning them in, spotlighting their squiggling feet before each gets her own lamp and tries in vain to pinpoint everyone else’s fast-moving steps.

The New Yorker

May 10, 2006

The work of this talented young choreographer has invited comparisons to Cunningham and Butoh, but it more boldly recalls the very beginnings of modern dance.

The New Yorker

The young choreographer’s new “Seven Times Fall Down, Eight Times Get Up” reveals her gift for simple, strong images.

The New York Times

April 6, 2005

Watching Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s “Seven Times Fall Down, Eight Times Get Up” on Thursday night was like attending a service in an unfamiliar house of worship, ritualistic, meditative.

Martha Myers, Dean Emeritus of The American Dance Festival

November 20, 2004

Aynsley Vandenbroucke is an intriguing young choreographer, exploring extremes, essences of emotions and actions. Her work is thoughtful, intense, minimalist, puzzling. Its images hold in your mind, inviting you back to ask questions, rethink aesthetic assumptions.