Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordan Fuchs.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I grew up in Rhode Island playing sports. I liked dancing too, but I thought it was just something you did socially. I went to college expecting to be a lawyer. That all changed my first year of college after an invite from my roommate to see a modern dance concert a friend of his was in. That concert changed my life. I had never before seen such a combination of physically challenging movement and creative expression. I was hooked. The next semester I started off in modern dance 101 and just kept going. Soon I was also making dances, captivated at the experience of having images and ideas realized on stage. Since then I have continued to choreograph for my own dance company, first in San Francisco, later in New York City and most recently in Denton, where I am a dance professor at Texas Woman’s University. After almost 30 years of choreographing professionally, I am grateful for this unexpected journey that has carried me from Taipei to Moscow, Tokyo to Prague, Australia to England, and from NYC to Denton.
Please tell us about your art.
I am a choreographer and a performer who loves to dance and to make dances. One of the wonderful things about modern dance is its central premise that any movement can be dance. I find this premise very freeing. Every time I make a new dance I have no idea what the finished dance will be. Though perhaps not the most direct or efficient way of working, as someone who loves the obsessive tinkering-in-the-garage creative work of exploring together with dancers in the dance studio, I think this process yields the most surprising and rich results.
The kind of work I make typically involves a lot of contact improvisation-based partnering, in which dancers are using touch and each other’s weight and momentum to develop intriguing ways of moving together. Think somewhere between ballroom dance and martial arts, though instead of using your partner’s weight against them you are working with their weight cooperatively to see what is possible.
Rather than making dances about something, I am more interested in making dances that offer experiences- complex, multifaceted and open to many possible interpretations.
Much of my aesthetic is grounded in improvisational practice, and for this reason, I like to work with performers who are risk takers and willing to challenge themselves, even in performance.
In order to reach wider audiences, beyond those that attend dance concerts, I also make dances for alternative venues, such as video screens, museums, and outdoor spaces.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing artists today?
It hasn’t changed in my experience. It’s always a lack of adequate funding for the arts. Specifically here in the DFW Metroplex, the lack of funding support manifests itself as a dearth of financial resources for emerging and experimental dance artists and dance companies in the form of grant funding, presentation support, commissions, and small performance spaces (150 seats) with the sprung floors necessary for presenting dance. There’s so much potential too because there are so many excellent high school and university programs for dance: TWU, SMU, TCU, UNT and Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts; and thus so many excellent dancers here. But there isn’t yet the ecosystem and infrastructure to support emerging choreographers and small dance companies to give many of those excellent dancers a reason to stay in the area rather than move on to NYC or LA.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
This spring I have three performances:
March 22, the Jordan Fuchs Company will show an excerpt of a new quartet at Eastfield College.
May 17 and 18 the Jordan Fuchs Company will show three premiers in its annual concert at Texas Woman’s University Studio Dance Theatre.
June 7-13, I will perform a new site dance, in collaboration with Martheya Nygaard and Yeajean Choi of kNOwBOX dance, in the Czech Republic as part of the 14th Prague Quadrennial.
The calendar page on www.jordanfuchs.org is the best way to keep track of what I am up to.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jordanfuchs.org
Image Credit:
Ground field – video still, Group Action – Lisa Vining, Jordan Fuchs headshot – Lisa Vining, Landscape – video still, torsion – Jordan Fuchs
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