Koosil-ja Hwang

After moving to New York in 1981 to study dance with Merce Cunningham, she became a member of the Wendy Perron Dance Company from 1987-89. The recipient of five National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer Fellowships and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, her work has been presented in New York by such venues as the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, The Kitchen, La MaMa E.T.C., Aaron Davis Hall, Performance Space 122, The Performing Garage, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Central Park SummerStage, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria and LMCC’s Swing Space.

Nationally, her work has been presented by Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, The Contemporary Arts Center, Dance Umbrella, Diverseworks, Jumpstart, Walker Arts Center, American Dance Festival and the University of Wisconsin. She has toured to various locations in The Netherlands and Germany. In addition to her own projects, Koosil-Ja has worked with the Wooster Group and in 2004, she received a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award in Choreography for the creation of mech[a]OUTPUT and deadmandancing EXCESS. Koosil-Ja’s latest dance and media work, Dance Without Bodies, premiered at The Kitchen in New York in 2006, and will be performed in Berlin in August. Critics heralded the piece as “Profoundly moving… an exciting, provocative, sometimes hilarious illustration of the body as a vessel for nearly unprocessed data” (Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice) and noted “The dancing was vigorous and energetic, and fascinating to check against the three different video offerings. “(John Rockwell, The New York Times). Her new live cinema project, Blocks of Continuality/Movement-Live Cinema will premiere in New York in fall 2008. Koosil-Ja was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.      

Koosil-ja’s new work, Dance Without Body explores “presence” and introduces a performance method, Live Processing in collaboration with Benton-C Bainbridge (live video), Melissa F. Guerrero (dance), and Geoff Matters (music, video, and software design.) Koosil-ja studies Body Without Organs (a key concept in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), which promotes the ideas that the self can be considered an arrangement in a constant state of process. This arrangement is a flow that connects with other flows, each into the others. Live Processing was created as a result of the study as well as her experience performing with the Wooster Group.  Live Processing and the dancers become a flow that operates on the cutting edge of movement, decoding and “deterritorializing” to achieve a new movement paradigm. For over forty years, modern dance has been centered on either classic modern exposition, or purely abstract improvisation. Koosil-ja’s exploration of BwO, developed more recently than those traditions, offers a new route for artistic development. By boldly eschewing the restrictions of these two modern dance traditions (while respecting the lessons learned from each), she seeks answers for the question “What are the foundations for the creation of the new?” Combining elements of philosophy, body, and digital technology, Dance Without Body will separate out and dissect the component processes of embodied performance, allowing for a new creative assemblage ripe for digital interface and experimentation.

Source: www.Dancekk.com

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