graze is a 12.5-minute solo {re}searching a spacious performance tone that can change in presence as actions lend different meanings to the forms of the antlers. Finding shifting relationships of care, oppression, spiritual anatomy, archetypes, and symbolism. Themes of bone time, tenderness, weight of masculinity, past life/deadness/aliveness, landscape, fertility, phallus, and frontier ...
The making of graze began in residence at the Omi International Dance Collective (Ghent, NY) and has been presented at both Movement Research’s Judson Church and Open Performance in New York City.
Video of graze at The University of Maine IMRC Center
Video of graze at Movement Research's Judson Church
Photo credits: Ian Douglas, Adam Larsen
Janice Lancaster first started working with Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2005. The Company performs annually in New York City, where it has been presented by the Lincoln Center Festival, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Park Avenue Armory, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Asia Society, and Fall for Dance at City Center. Recent highlights include the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá in Colombia; Festival de Danse in Cannes, France; performances at Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow, Russia; MDC’s Museum of Art+Design, in conjunction with Art Basel/Miami Beach; a four-city tour of Italy, including Milan; performances at Lincoln Center, as part of the inaugural season of Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance; the premiere of Untitled No. 12-2 at the 2015 Spoleto Festival USA; and a tour to Germany, Austria, and Luxembourg. Last fall, the Company premiered Neither at BAM’s Next Wave Festival and toured China with performances in Beijing, Shanghai, and Zhuhai.
Black Whole premiered at Asheville, NC's downtown skate park in 2009. We enjoyed invaluable support from the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, the City of Asheville, Moog Music and Centering on Children. It is one of my most significant leaps into choreography as community event. Projections co-designed with Adam Larsen / live music by Jason Daniello / Total running time: 50 minutes / 10 dancers / 2 skate boarders.
“Janice Lancaster and Adam Larsen's site-specific, performance/installation at Asheville's downtown skate park was an amazing evening of movement, light, sound, and creativity. In the tradition of Black Mountain College, Black Whole forged new relationships and connections between the everyday and the extraordinary. It merged the movement of dance with the glide of the skateboard while surrounded by the shape of light. The notion of how and where a multi-media performance can take place was truly redefined. To look into the skate park bowl was to look into a portal to another world that unfolded in front of the audience. Not only did the skate park become an image-based environment, but also the technology actually shifted and interacted with its participants. The dancers were shaped, compelled, and constrained by the environment of light and shadow that surrounded them. That combined with the cavernous depth of the bowl, shifted and warped perspective in new and exciting ways. The analog soundtrack, combined with the Doppler effect of the nearby highway traffic, fully immersed the audience into an evening of wonderful invention and awe-inspiring imagination.”
- Gene Felice, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Newsletter
Photos by Jesse Anders
Caryatid is a collaboration with projection designer Adam Larsen and sound artist Kimathi Moore. Tubes of PVC are illumined with projected imagery, and we are mining hierarchal archetypes of upright and lying, surface and depth, visible and invisible. Like a forest of the psyche, this audio and visual environment was constructed to be an extension of the dancer(s) interior experience. Caryatid was first workshopped and presented with the support of the BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE MUSEUM + ARTS CENTER.
Video of Caryatid
“Lancaster deploys her dancers well in space, and she exploits beautifully klezmer’s loopy slightly sinister, and deeply infectious rhythms, melodies, and unexpected tempo changes." - Tasmin Nutter, The Arts Cure New York, NY
“St. John’s Wort,” by Janice Lancaster, was like whipped cream and a cherry atop the evening." - Rachel Levin, Explore Dance Palm Desert, CA
“Ms. Lancaster produced a rhythmic Hellzapoppin.” - Robert Plyler, The Sunday Post Journal Jamestown, NY
“One of the side effects of the herb St. John’s Wort is restlessness. But restless doesn’t begin to describe the energy crackling through Lancaster’s dance of the same name.” - Bob Workmon, Winston-Salem Journal, NC
St. John’s Wort animates the contagion of anticipation and nervous energy. It has been toured internationally by Hubbard St. 2 Dance Company (Chicago), and also performed at City Dance Center, Roger Williams University, NC School of the Arts, Joyce Soho, Ailey Citigroup Theatre, and the McCallum Theatre.
An installation performance with six fans blowing, threads of feelings and sensations vectoring the space, and an audience breathing and moving through. A making visible of intersubjective spaces. Total running time: 1.5 hours
Something eye don’t want to feel was developed alongside my thesis research on the transmission of group affect during the Hollins University MFA Program and presented in the American Dance Festival’s MFA Thesis Concert in Durham, NC. It has also been presented at the RE-Viewing Black Mountain College International Conference in Asheville, NC where it was seen within the context of artist Kenneth Snelson’s tensegrity sculptures.
Video of Something eye don't want to feel
Photos by Adam Larsen, Alice Sebrell, Bruce Wong
slipped slip was conceived when curator Gene Felice paired artist R. Brooke Priddy, composer Kimathi Moore, and choreographer Janice Lancaster to collaborate on the theme of Moog Music’s ADSR sound wave envelope. Through the creation of an earthen garment and the process of its gradual decay, the collaboration created a figurative definition of the words ATTACK, DECAY, SUSTAIN, and RELEASE.
The hour solo performance of slipped slip is preceded by an installation in which the earthen garment by R. Brooke Priddy hangs on suspended display, slowly decaying as pulsing speakers from within play a low bass rumble in the performer’s absence.
slipped slip has been presented at the Arts Council Gallery of Asheville, NC with the support of the Bob Moog Foundation, and at The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC.
Video of slipped slip
Strawberry and Bass, is a 9 minute solo inside Kima Moore’s sound painting. As a collection of acoustic bass samples strung together and collaged into a dynamic aural landscape, Moore's sound inspires a sense of place as widening field - brimming with accidents, coincidences, and gaps. Along rumbling, elastic textures, my tasks are in active relation to all that I hear simmering below the surface. I’m thinking of strawberry as chameleon, her flesh growing from white to green to pink to scarlet, materializing in tiny increments as sugar and starch, to be tasted or yet to decay. It’s a solo of necessary harvest; as trifoliate leaves cup towards sun; five-petaled star-flowers become berry; and noded runners inevitably strew - rooted and unrooted, dancing an urgent nonchalance.
Video of Strawberry and Bass at the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (CCCD) in Asheville, NC
Photos by Spenser Dugal
toGETher is a 15 minute duet which opens in a slow ambiguous intimacy and concludes in stereotypes, both comical and tragic, of woman’s “becoming.”
toGETher was developed alongside thesis research on the transmission of group affect during the Hollins University MFA Program and presented in the American Dance Festival’s Draftworks evening in Durham, NC.
2011 Quasi Equivalence A floating, geodesic dome / performance space / projection screen, anchored to the surface of Lake Eden in Black Mountain NC. On the original campus of Black Mountain College, for the 2011 {Re}HAPPENING community art event we created this outdoor, site-specific art installation and sent 3 dancers by boat into it’s contained performance space, creating connections between projected light, electronic music, dance & movement, architecture, sculpture, perspective and history. Projection designers Gene Felice and Paul Lewis Anderson, sound by Kima Moore, dancers Claire Elizabeth Barratt and Kathleen Hahn
2009 Fetching Phantasma Hollins University Fall Dance Gathering, Taubman Museum, Roanoke, VA
2009 heaviness and lightness Hollins University/ADF MFA Program studies for Contemporary Art Practices
2008 ever ever ever Performática, Puebla, Mexico; Galapagos Art Space FRAMEWORKS dance film series, NYC; Flea Theatre, NYC; Casa Hoffman in Curitiba, Brazil; the Chisenhale Dance Space’s TV Dinners Festival, London, UK
2007 Bridge Performática, Puebla, Mexico; Galapagos Art Space’s FRAMEWORKS dance film series, NYC; Flea Theatre, NYC; the Casa Hoffman in Curitiba, Brazil
2002 Occident Loft series, Asheville, NC; One Arm Red, Brooklyn, NY
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a Beloved? - Rainer Maria Rilke
“When a dancer thrusts her hands into tall drinking glasses, making herself into a frustrated creature both fragile and dangerous she might shatter at any minute (a lover in other words); when her male partner leads her offstage in a tortuous manner, having her step from one overturned tumbler to another as he rotates three of them on the floor.” - Claudia La Rocco, New York Times
Choreography by Janice Lancaster / Projections and sound co-designed by Janice Lancaster and Adam Larsen / Premiered Jan 31-Feb 3, 2008 with VIA Dance Collaborative at Dance New Amsterdam / Total running time: 27 minutes / 7 dancers
Circuitous grazing is a 2-hour solo performance, and as luck would have it, outdoors in the rain. It was developed at Robert Wilson’s International Summer Residency for their 19th Annual Watermill Center Summer Benefit, The Big Bang in Water Mill, NY. There is no accompanying sound, but a track has been added here to help the seams of this short montage.
One standing on the platform. The other sitting on her train. The landscape passes. Towards and away, a stillness insists.
The Gradient's Against Her was made when choreographer Janice Lancaster collaborated with projection designer Adam Larsen and Composer Kimathi Moore for the Asheville 2016 Fringe Arts Festival, winning "Artists that most pushed the boundaries between Time and Space.”
2016 Opera Omaha - Omaha, NE Semele, role of Ino, choreographed by Gustavo Ramírez Sansano
2013 Stravinsky and His World Program 5: Sight and Sound From Abstraction to Surrealism directed by Anne Patterson, Bard College Music Festival, Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater, Annadale-on-Hudson, NY
2013 Parade and Ragtime Bard College Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater - Annadale-on-Hudson, NY
2013 San Francisco Symphony: Peer Gynt, role of Ingrid, directed by James Darrah, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas
2008 Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: Dancer for projection design in Górecki/Brahms Concert
2008 Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People: freedom of information 2008 (24-hour performance/protest/ritual), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, NC and online streaming with related blog and interviewed in Theatre Topics Personal Is Political, Practice as Critical: The "freedom of information" Performer as Site for Change written by Amanda Hamp
2011-2012 Danielle Russo Performance Project, works performed: a world where alarm clocks ring in the morning; That one should open like an eyelid. Performances in: Puebla, Mexico (Performática), Brooklyn (Wave Rising Series), Durham (American Dance Festival MFA Thesis Performance and “Draftworks”)
2008-2005 Kathleen Hahn’s Dance Club: danced in the following films: Open Your Hearts, Not Your Stomachs; SPORT: Sweat Sponge; Activate with Water
