DD Dorvillier
(NY/FR)
2008, 2013, 2014, 2015
- DD Dorvillier Puerto Rico, 1967. Choreographer and performer DD Dorvillier has been developing her work and practice in New York City since 1989. In 2010 she moved to France and has continued to elaborate her work internationally. Through her original works DD Dorvillier has always challenged pre-established definitions, including her own, of dance and choreography. By building works through physical, conceptual, and philosophical approaches Dorvillier addresses issues of spectatorship, translation, and meaningfulness, in a playful yet urgent manner.
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In 1991 she and dancer/choreographer Jennifer Monson created the Matzoh Factory in Brooklyn New York. For over a decade the studio was a grassroots site for wild experimentation where choreographers and artists congregated for low-tech/low-cost shows, rehearsals, parties, and readings. She has worked and collaborated with many different artists in different fields such as: Jennifer Monson, Zeena Parkins, Jennifer Lacey, Yvonne Meier, Sarah Michelson, Karen Finley, Pavol Lishka and Kelly Copper, Jefta Van Dinther, Fred Gies, Anne Juren, Annie Dorsen, and many others. Honors include The Doris Duke Performing Arts Award (2013), a Creative Capital grant (2013), multiple MAP Fund grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant (2007), as well as Bessies in choreography for Dressed for Floating (2002) and performance for Parades & Changes, replays (2008).
With her company human future dance corps Dorvillier has been presented and commissioned in New York and abroad by PS 122, The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, and Movement Research, ImPulsTanz, Kaaitheater, and Rencontres Internationales Chorégraphiques de Seine St Denis, among others. She has had residencies at New York Live Arts, Movement Research, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MANCC in Tallahassee Florida, C.N.D.C. Angers, PACT Zollverein, STUK Kunstencentrum, La Ménagerie de Verre, L’Atélier de Paris/Carolyn Carlson, and others. A recent work, Danza Permanente, a Beethoven string quartet transposed into movement for four dancers, in silence, premiered at STUK, in Leuven Belgium in 2012 touring includes: Rencontres Internationales Chorégraphiques de Seine-St. Denis; The Kitchen, NYC; Kaaitheater Brussels; Alte Oper Frankfurt.
In 2014, at the invitation of Danspace Project in New York, Dorvillier created the Danspace Project Platform 2014: Diary of an Image by DD Dorvillier, a four week platform focusing on her history, work, and practice, including the premieres of two projects: Diary of an Image (with dancer Katerina Andreou, music by Zeena Parkins and lighting design by Thomas Dunn) and A catalogue of steps. This work was developed in part during several residencies at MANCC. Most recently Dorvillier collaborated with Sébastien Roux on the site specific plage, cour, école in the context of the festival “A domicile” in Brittany, France.
Extra Shapes
Returning Choreographic Fellow | March 5 – 13, 2015
Collaborators in residence: Walter Dundervill, Katerina Andreou [dancers], and Sébastien Roux [composer]
Extra Shapes is a movement event for lunging figures, a musical concert for loudspeakers, and a light show. Choreographer DD Dorvillier continues to pursue an ongoing interest in the formal tensions and impossibilities that exist between the mediums of sound, light, and bodies in the realm of the stage and its spectacle while proposing a new way of experiencing and thinking about abstraction in a live situation.
Featuring a separate and simultaneous scores for dancers, loudspeakers, and lights Extra Shapes occupies a rectangular space divided into three horizontal stripes of equal depth. Each stripe is assigned a medium – sound, light, dance. Dorvillier imagines this construct as if it were a rectangular slice of Neopolitan ice cream – three separate bands of ice cream, strawberry (sound), vanilla (light), chocolate (movement). Rotating the plate, to view each of its sides, creates four different perspectives on the same 20 minute long sequence. The object itself, the rectangle of sound, light, and dance (like the imagined rectangle of ice cream) stays the same. The viewer’s perspective completes the piece.
The content of Extra Shapes is developed independently by each collaborator, and emerges, in part, out of the practical issues that arise from this playful proposition of a high-tech rotation of a giant slice of Neopolitan ice cream.
While at MANCC, Dorvillier and dancers Walter Dundervill and Katerina Andreou focused on refining the dance stripe, while composer Sébastien Roux continued to research and experiment with sound spatialization and the finalization of the sound score. Additionally, scholar Dr. Daniel Sack was embedded in the residency from March 10 – 13 to respond to and support the documentation of the process. Sack, formerly a professor of Theatre Studies at FSU and now faculty at UM-Amherst, first worked with Dorvillier in September 2012 when he moderated a panel on “Performance as Research.”
This residency was funded, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Extra Shapes by DD Dorvillier/ human future dance corps was commissioned by EMPAC/ Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY and premiered there on March 20, 2015.
Diary of an Image / A catalogue of steps
Returning Choreographic Fellow | April 10 – 26, 2014
Collaborators in Residence: Katerina Andreou, Oren Barnoy, Nibia Pastrana [Performers/Dancers], Zeena Parkins [Composer].
DD Dorvillier/human future dance corps returned to MANCC to continue work on two pieces, Diary of an Image and A catalogue of steps. The two works constitute the spine of a four week platform dedicated to the choreographer’s work and practice. Dorvillier was previously in residence for Diary of an Image and A catalogue of steps in September 2013.
While in residence, Dorvillier worked on finalizing audio elements for Diary of an Image and movement generation for A catalogue of steps. Early in the residence, Dorvillier, accompanied by composer Zeena Parkins and performer Katerina Andreou, visited the FSU Printing Press for a tour and to record sound. Several presses were sampled to collect multiple sound clips. Along with recordings at the print shop, Dorvillier and collaborators utilized the School of Dance audio lab to generate additional material for the sound score. During the first week, portions of the work were shared with a small audience of MANCC staff and theater professor Dr. Daniel Sack for feedback and reflection.
Dorvillier was joined during the second week by performers Oren Barnoy and Nibia Pastrana, who along with Katerina Andreou, continued to develop movement for A catalogue of steps. Dorvillier opened rehearsal for Dr. Daniel Sack and theater students from Sack’s “History of Live Art” course. The students offered feedback and engaged in a discussion of the work.
Danspace Project presented Diary of an Image, which includes this work and A catalogue of steps, as a month long platform from May 22-June 15, 2014.
The residency is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Diary of an Image / A catalogue of steps
Returning Choreographic Fellow | September 3 – 14, 2013
Collaborators in Residence: Katerina Andreou [Performer/Dancer], Zeena Parkins [Composer]
DD Dorvillier/human future dance corps returned to MANCC with composer Zeena Parkins, and performer Katerina Andreou, for the first of a two-part residency. During her periods in residency, Dorvillier is developing two new works, Diary of an Image and A catalogue of steps. These pieces will constitute the spine of a four week platform dedicated to the choreographer’s work and practice, at Danspace Project in Spring 2014. The Danspace invitation provoked an important reflection on some key issues, such as: the counter-purposes of a dance archive, the shifting identity of a choreographic work over time, the value of a dance, the choreographer as a social image. At times these works seem to behave with historic intentions, but ultimately they show themselves as entirely new works.
Diary of an Image, is the first of the two works Dorvillier is developing for the platform series. The piece playfully contends with the question of how image, or an image, is produced and functions, what images are inadvertently produced through an abstract choreography, how are images used internally to feed a dance. As part of her research for the piece, Dorvillier and collaborators met with Kathleen McCormick, MA/MS, Associate Dean for Special Collections and Archives at FSU’s Strozier Library. The engagement was an opportunity to learn about archiving from an institutional perspective and examine Dorvillier’s own organizational process.
Accompanying their research, Dorvillier and her collaborators worked on developing the music, set design and continued to refine the concept of the project through a panel and open discussion. Dorvillier, Parkins, and Andreou experimented with the accompanying sound score through the use of a prepared piano. Investigating design elements, Dorvillier and her collaborators created cardboard cut-outs representing dancers from past work. Near the end of the residency, Dorvillier held a panel in Dodd Hall, allowing her to examine elements of the work in the historic FSU Werkmeister Reading Room. A diverse array of FSU Departments, including faculty and students from the School of Dance, Theatre, Religion, History as well as members of the community were in attendance.
Danspace Project presented Diary of an Image as a month long platform May 22-June 15, 2014.
The residency is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Choreography, a Prologue for the Apocalypse of Understanding, Get Ready!
Dance Theater Workshop Partnership Project | November 10 – 22, 2008
Collaborators in Residence: Zeena Parkins [composer], Thomas Dunn [lighting designer], Heather Kravas, Amanda Pina, and Elizabeth Ward [dancers]
Dorvillier continued developing CPAU, Get Ready!, a suite of related but distinct parts seeking to address notions of communication and implied politics of understanding. She and her collaborators focused on creating scores for movement, sound and lighting design, using the CYMK color model. Dorvillier described the work as “a discursive dance in-between, not based on the sensuality of embodiment but on the manifestation of a severe, unusual, and playful choreographic protocol, which fuses sound, form, movement, and color.”
Choreography, a Prologue for the Apocalypse of Understanding, Get Ready! premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in January, 2009.