FLATLAND (2009)

length: 60 minutes

FLATLAND casts a surrealist tone with implications of anxiety and beauty. Inspired by Edmund Burke's On the Sublime (1756), this evocative, layered work creates an alluring tension while juxtaposing different forms and mediums (dance, film, animation). The dance hatches a dream-like world of precise and pulsating movement set against white-washed walls and featuring sound from David Lynch's 1977 movie Eraserhead. Considered an open-text choreography, the suggestive work makes layers of association to allow it to be received uniquely by each viewer. FLATLAND further develops Ms. Justice's interest in a poetics based on perception. She is honing a relational approach to choreography where divergent sources of information meet and create a context for interplay.

Performed by Maggie Bennett, Kendra Portier & Alli Ruszkowski. Original music and sound by Nicholas Patterson. Lighting design by Joe Levasseur. Sound from David Lynch's film Eraserhead. Video by Vanessa Justice with Rachel Boggia, Kareen Balsam & Hannah Carpenter. Animation by Emily Wormley. Costumes by Maira Santos Houck & Vanessa Justice. Sculpture by Hans van Meeuwen.

Expulsion (2008-2009)

Vanessa Justice contributes choreography and performance to Anita Glesta's new multi-channel video based on Masaccio's fresco, "The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden." Vanessa's expressive body, quietly moving in shadowy black-and-white, suggests the humanism and pathos of Masaccio's work. Please visit anitaglesta.com.

my copy world (2008)

length: 30 minutes

music: Ingram Marshall, Lucky Dragons, Johnny Cash

This piece imagines the desire and struggle for human connection within a hyperreal world, as postulated by philosopher Baudrillard, that blends reality and representation, and where social behavior is perpetuated by being viewed and endlessly copied. The dance is a meditation about how signs and mirroring act as the underlying context for courtship, power, illusion, and understanding. Different movement languages and contexts develop, repeat, and decay. Ten dancers (staged as versions of each other) poignantly combine sincerity and artifice. This exercise in bricolage includes slide projection also by Vanessa Justice. Commissioned by the professional repertory company of the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance.

Visitor (2008)

length: 10 minutes

music/sound: Robert Ashley, She Was a Visitor

Set against the sound and flurry of a battalion of fans, this solo explores states of arrival and disappearance, evoking an eerie world at once quotidian and alien. The piece strips away layers of itself to finally reveal its own emptiness and the disappearance of the dancer from the dance. A manipulation of objects suggests a kind of puppetry, until the objects become inanimate—like the detritus left behind after a person passes away. This piece was commissioned and performed by Wesleyan University Dance Professor, Rachel Boggia.

Noise'sNoise (2008)

length: 20 minutes

sound installation: Vanessa Justice

music: Robert Ashley, Alvin Curran

Winter coats, a whistling tea kettle...white noise, tree trunks, long wigs removed and replaced, negative sound and space...These elements form an atmospheric projection of absence (as the dark underbelly of presence?) where the emptiness that we fear finds expression. As six siren-like dancers harness and dispel energy, they hang in limbo between a glassy facade and vulnerable disclosure. A sound installation places the dancers and audience inside an aural environment of varying sound frequencies including Robert Ashley's whispered Automatic Writing and ballgame radio. The dance was guided by the question, "How might the dance evolve tone, subtext and form via movements of attention?"

2-Liter Alteration (2007)

length: 12 minutes

music: Eluvium

The duet operates within a shifting context of continuously altering elements of movement, set, and costume to create an experience of the passage of time. The piece considers cyclic and linear time, markers in time, diurnal time and routine, the movement of presence through time, catching up to 'lost time', and time already past.

Study Series, 2-Liter Alteration (2005-2007)

These studies were used to make 2-Liter Alteration."

2-Liters (2006)

length: 8 minutes

This solo, forlorn and haunting, is set against a suspended two-liter bottle of red paint streaming upon a large canvas. 

The Mirth of Floating Sideways (2003 & 2004)

length: 15 minutes

music: recordings by Clara Rockmore, Brian Casey, others

Structured with repetitions of Tchaikovsky's Valse Sentimentale, this piece journeys through a series of movement scenes set in monochrome with black costumes and a light gray floor. The dance is about choreographic choices and methods.  From this piece, Vanessa developed what she called "poetic-relational body" which refers to the dancer's ability to change the definition of "body" according to context and poetic intention.  Further, Vanessa discovered her desire to create pieces by inter-relating texts that exist outside the dance, and to make choreographing an open-process that is responsive to itself and its working environment.

Canary and the Gray Matter (2004)

length: 3 minutes, solo music: Pat Metheny

This short solo explored changes of effort quality.

**List of older works available upon request.