The choreographer on starting the annual Texas Dance Improvisation Festival and presenting at the Dance Council’s Dallas Dances festival.
Dallas — A well-known associate professor of dance at Texas Woman’s University (TWU), Jordan Fuchs has been making dances grounded in improvisational practices since the early 1990’s. At that point he was living and working in San Francisco until he moved to New York City in 1998, which he then left in 2007 to take his position with TWU. His work uses the aesthetic values of improvisation to find the instability of each performance moment, the possibility of transformation through sensation and the inherent state of moving always in relationship to another and to our environment, according to his Web site.
Throughout his career Fuchs has danced for artists, including K.J. Holmes, Kirstie Simson, Mark Dendy, Luka Kito/Megan Boyd, Rebecca Lazier, Gina Jacobs, Scott Wells, Lizz Roman, Joanne Nerenberg and Potrezebie. Fuchs is a Fulbright Specialist and has been on faculty at Hunter College and Movement Research. He has taught workshops at numerous universities and festivals across the United States and internationally. Fuchs is also a former dance specialist in the Jerome Robbins Moving Image Archive of the Dance Division of the New York Public Library.
For Dallas Dances he will be presenting a 6.5-minute excerpt from the second half of his work Torsion, which premiered in 2017 at the Jordan Fuchs Company’s spring performance at TWU’s Dance Studio Theater. Featuring dancers Michelle Beard, Whitney Geldon and Melissa Sanderson, the originally 20-minute trio explores movements centered in the pelvis and the body’s connective tissue, the fascia. The piece also includes original sound composition by Andy Russ and lighting design by Roma Flowers.
“I was intrigued at the movement possibly between the layers of skin, muscle and bone,” Fuchs says about the inspiration for the piece. “For instance, if you hold your forearm in your hand and rotate your forearm there is a lot of movement possible. I wanted to know what kind of dancing could emerge from paying attention to such subtlety.”
“When I start projects, I only define starting points.,” he adds. “I never know where they will end up and that is one of the pleasures of choreography for me. Finding where I end up.”
In addition to teaching and choreographing, Fuchs is also the founder of the annual Texas Dance Improvisation Festival, which will be celebrating its 10th anniversary this October with special guest artist Judith Sánchez Ruíz, a former dancer with both Trisha Brown and Sasha Walsh. “I wanted to create a space where improvisational dance practices and movement forms such as contact improvisation could be front and center rather than an alternative offer, particularly in moving here from New York City over a decade ago, a place where such practices were so integral to the dance making of me and many of my peers,” Fuchs says about jumpstarting the festival in Dallas.
“The mission of the annual festival has been to share, inspire and challenge the improvisational dance community in Texas through bringing in internationally renowned guest artists and creating opportunities for sharing teaching, performing and dance practices and for networking.”
>This Dallas Dances profile was originally posted on TheaterJones.com.
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