HIJACK
(MN)
2011, 2015
- HIJACK is the choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon & Arwen Wilder. Van Loon & Wilder grew up in Chicago, met at Colorado College, and established their collaboration in Minneapolis in 1993. HIJACK's roots in a liberal arts setting isolated in the mountains laid the foundation for experimentation, invention without precedent, and making dance out of everything but dance.
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“Our dances embrace juxtaposition. Believing work left in dialogue form opens itself to dialogue with the audience, we present two individuals’ point-of- view, yet unreconciled. We ask “how can two different or contradictory elements (people/values) exist together?” with our idealistic belief that they can. In this way we avoid didactic treatment of sociopolitical issues striving, instead, for subtlety and wit when addressing serious subjects. “
HIJACK is best known for “short-shorts”: pop song-length miniatures designed to deliver a sharp shock and collaborations with po-mo hero Scott Heron. HIJACK actively questions where and for whom dance is performed by choosing unconventional venues and projects. Specializing in the inappropriate, they toy with audiences’ expectations through their interpretation of venue. They perform each HIJACK dance in both social and theatrical spaces. Pieces bear the imprints of the places they’ve been.
HIJACK has taught and performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory), Japan, Russia, Central America, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in Maine. In spring, 2014, Contact Quarterly published the chapbook “Passing For Dance —a HIJACK reader”.
To mark HIJACK’s 20th anniversary as a collaboration, Walker Art Center commissioned redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye. Development of the kaleidoscopic nonet began at MANCC in 2011. It premiered with full theatrical fabulousness at Walker Art Center in December 2013. This season, HIJACK is pulverizing the work into a trio for small/awkward spaces, calling it Tchotchke, and touring it to Legion Arts (Iowa) and Colorado College. In 2014-5, HIJACK pulverized “…radish…” into a trio for small and awkward spaces: “China Mall 65” for escalators in Minneapolis’ City Center, “Tchotchke” for Legion Arts in Iowa and the TEMP museum in Minneapolis, and “Soggy Oil Wife” for a grand stairway in Colorado Springs.
HIJACK's Aftermath
Partnership Project: McKnight Artist Fellow | March 29 – April 11, 2015
Collaborators in residence: Margit Galanter, Naomi Joy, Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson, Morgan Thorson [dance artists]
HIJACK returned to MANCC to initiate a new project: HIJACK’s Aftermath. In their 22nd year as a collaboration HIJACK is interrogating their process of making work and asking “can an awesome dance be made in ANY amount of time?”. To challenge their approach to performance, HIJACK created an exploratory residency, essentially a laboratory that investigated their relationship to improvisation. To initiate these investigations, HIJACK invited Lisa Nelson to join them for their first week in residence. Nelson has developed a practice called Tuning Scores that explores the physical senses in imagination, performance and movement observation. Along with Nelson, HIJACK gathered a group of dancers from around the country to experiment with the skills and material they developed. Nelson, HIJACK and collaborators workshopped elements of Tuning Scores during the School of Dance weekly forum, allowing students to experiment with how conditioning affects ways of seeing and connecting to work.
The second half of the residency allowed HIJACK to integrate the experiences of the first week into their practice. They had an opportunity to research libraries as physical and conceptual containers for searching, browsing and organizing abundance of material and then relate their findings to composition and choreography. They had meetings and tours with Library Scholars Pam Doffek and Leila Gibradze at Goldstein Library and Associate Dean for Special Collections & Archives Katie McCormick at Strozier Library, and then spent time improvising in and around the library spaces. Additionally, they engaged with the School of Dance ‘MANCC Experience’ Class, sharing two movement explorations that reflected their work with Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores and held a Q&A for students.
This residency was supported, in part, by the McKnight Artist Fellowships for Choreographers, a program funded by The McKnight Foundation and administered by Northrop that supports Minnesota individual artists.
redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye
Choreographic Fellows | January 14 – February 1, 2011
Collaborators in Residence: Bill Starr [photographer, writer, archivist and dramaturg], Morgan Thorson, Jennifer Arave [performers]
While at MANCC, choreographers Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder (HIJACK) began the development of a new work based on the investigation of verbal narratives. Their research included working in the studio with writers Jennifer Portman, Senior Writer for the Tallahassee Democrat, author Pam Ball and author and American Book Award Winner Bob Shacochis as well as FSU School of Dance students. As part of Kristin’s focus on journalism HIJACK toured Florida’s capital city newspaper The Tallahassee Democrat and discussed issues relating to the endangered status of the print newspaper, the public record and writing history with Democrat staff. Arwen was specifically interested in researching the area of language development and explored the linguistic rhythm of dance and creation of narrative when viewing dance during the residency.
During the process of development they addressed their approach to collaboration – as a duet they have a successful model for artistic union, but wanted to challenge their assumptions and reliable structures for co-creating. To this end, they looked at the mythology of HIJACK, the story of nearly 20 years of collaboration with photographer Bill Starr who has been following their work since 1991.
In addition, they participated in a panel discussion about their collaborative work process with choreographer and MANCC Visiting Artist Juliette Mapp and shared their early work-in-progress at a public Informal Showing.