LABORATORIOS PNDA 2023
This summer PANDA LABS return for 2 immersions into performance and dance development!
PANDA [Performance And New Dance Arrivals] are some of the longest programs offered at the Field Center and they are deep dives into living with one another as artists while training daily with established teachers in the field. Daily classes are punctuated by swims in the river, saunas, fresh food from our gardens, long naps in the library, field trips and performances at night.
PANDA LAB I: KEITH HENNESSY + ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES | MAY 16 - 23
Closer
A workshop, laboratory, test test for dancers, performance makers, and you
The laboratory will attempt to generate a precarious and curious space between engagement and refuge, being present with queerness, the ongoing impact of political-health-ecological crises, and the importance of shared dance and inquiry. We will hang out in playful and non-productive spaces, being in a contagious relationship to past and future, ghosts and desire. We will approach queer and decolonial futurities through practices of opening to the unknown. We seek a soft experience where political crises and dancing bodies can be woven into a single conversation. Where bodies are energies, always entangled within the ecologies from which they emerge. There will be time for performance making, showing, and discussing.
Ishmael and Keith’s work does not always focus on their subjectivities as racialized, queered, aged, or gendered bodies but these issues, identities, privileges and harms are always present, always available materials for improvising and other practices of less conscious or mysterious action. Play is risky and revealing.
REGISTRATION IS OPEN NOW!
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BECA + TRABAJO COMERCIO
Ofrecemos 3 becas completas para personas negras, indígenas y de color [BIPOC] en cada sesión.
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Tenemos lugares limitados disponibles - Please COMUNÍQUESE CON NOSOTROS
REFUND POLICY: Full refunds available up to 10 days prior to the event. Please inform us if you cannot attend an event up to 10 days prior [including Scholars and Work Traders]! Refunds within the 10 days prior to the event may be available on a case-by case basis, please reach out to communications@thefieldcenter.com
ACERCA DEL FACILITADOR(ES)
Ishmael Houston-Jones is an award winning choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation.
Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd. In 2020 he recieved a fourth "Bessie" for Service to the Field of Dance. Houston-Jones is the DraftWork curator for works-in-progress at Danspace Project in New York. He has curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now both at Danspace Project.
Keith Hennessy dances in and around performance. Born in northern Ontario, he lives in San Francisco since 1982 and tours internationally. His performances engage improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and protest as tools for investigating political realities. Practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, post/Modern dance, activist art, the Bay Area, wicca, punk, contact improvisation, indigeneity, and queer-feminist performance motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s work. Keith’s 2016-17 collaborators include Peaches, Meg Stuart, Scott Wells, Jassem Hindi, J Jha, Annie Danger, Gerald Casel, and the collaboratives Blank Map and Turbulence. Keith's recent teaching in universities, independent studios, and festivals includes Ponderosa (Germany), FRESH (SF), HZT (Berlin), Movement Research (NYC), Impulstanz (Vienna), Portland State University, Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam), St. Mary's, VAC Foundation (Moscow), and Warsaw Flow International CI Festival. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artist Fellowship, a NY Bessie, multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, and a Bay Area Goldie. Keith's writings have been published in Contact Quarterly, Movement Research Journal, Performance Research (UK), Society of Dance History Scholars Journal, Dance Theatre Journal (UK), Itch, Front, and In Dance. Hennessy directs Circo Zero and was a member of Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann. Hennessy is a co-founder of CounterPULSE (formerly 848 Community Space) a thriving performance space in San Francisco. He earned an MFA and PhD from UC Davis.
Photo by Andrew Jordan
Paul Singh holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Illinois, USA. He has performed with a diverse range of choreographers and companies, including Gerald Casel, Risa Jaroslow, Phantom Limb Company, Stephanie Batten Bland, Douglas Dunn, Christopher Williams, Kathy Westwater, and Faye Driscoll. Notably, he was part of the inaugural cast of Punchdrunk’s American debut of Sleep No More.
Internationally, Paul has performed in Peter Sellars’ opera The Indian Queen (Madrid) and Peter Pleyer’s large-scale improvisation work Visible Undercurrent (Berlin). His choreographic works have been presented in venues across NYC and Berlin, with a highlight being the presentation of his solo piece Stutter at the Kennedy Center in 2004. Most recently, he premiered two new works for A.I.M by Kyle Abraham in 2024. An experienced educator in contact improvisation (CI), Paul teaches intensives and workshops globally, focusing on both teacher training and beginner studies. He is currently a faculty member at The Juilliard School, where he teaches various technique classes, including CI, floor work, contemporary, and partnering. From 2021 to 2023, he served as Program Manager at Baryshnikov Arts Center.
Jesse Zaritt's work engages drawing as dancing - a visual and physical practice linked to dreaming, drafting, and materializing futures. His choreographic, performance and teaching practices research the ways in which excessive, contemplative and resistive dance practices change how movement arises in the world and how dancing participates in processes of social transformation. A series of solo works made between 2008 and 2025 interrogate attachments to Jewish ritual and community, seeking to queer dominant paradigms of familial/national belonging, religion, gender and sexuality.
Jesse has performed his solo work in Taiwan, Uruguay, Korea, Germany, Japan, Mexico and throughout the United States. He has performed with Shen Wei Dance Arts and in the work of Netta Yerushalmy and Faye Driscoll; he worked as an artistic adviser for Driscoll's projects through April 2023. Jesse is a faculty member of the newly formed Bennington BFA Dance Lab and worked as an Associate Professor at the University of the Arts through the spring of 2024. He currently works in creative dialogue with Sara Shelton Mann.