In this short residency Jen Rosenblit and Gary Wilmes are invited to begin research towards a performance project initiated by Simone Aughterlony, titled Remaining Strangers. Pursuing our conceptions and affections of and for ‘the stranger’, this research takes emphasis on hospitality and endurance as it relates to locality and the necessity in times of hyper globalization to, in a sense, land back on earth. What would coming back to earth mean? How can we readopt the notion of locality, wherever that may be at any one time, beyond ideas of nationalism, borders, entitlement and ownership. In short, how can we ground ourselves in the local rather than in pursuit of a globalized future that can clearly only sustain the privileged few. Seeking to complicate the distinction between the guest—host relation through the proximity of bodies and sharing of ideas and materials, we recover a temporary and liminal place that spans and simultaneously blurs distinctions between Foreign, Other, Stranger, and Community. Reactionary positioning of the unknown or the foreign tells us it remains a crucial moment to begin countering the polemic of hostility by investing in the disappearing practice of invitation and welcoming. It is an instinctual phenomenon of humans to be in movement, that is, to enter into a modus that necessarily entails becoming a stranger or at the least becoming estranged/unfamiliar. How do we sense and foster the dimension of strange in each other, in the fundamental experience of not being at home in the world? The stranger here becomes the milieu between the non-milieu of the nameless and the lieu of the named.
Other figures might appear during a stay at the Invisible Dog Art Center. The chameleon is definitely invited to keep us guessing and sourcing from all that lies on the ground. Monologues could form and the give way to impromptu dialogue, conjectures and departures. This process lingers in a continuous sympoetic relation to and with others, understanding that nothing can be made or destroyed by itself
Gary Wilmes is an OBIE award winning actor based in New York. He has worked extensively with, Richard Maxwell, The Wooster Group, Simone Aughterloney, Richard Foreman, and Steppenwolf Theater Company. Acting credits include: Broadway; True West, Chinglish, Off Broadway; Mary Page Marlowe, Straight White Men, Gatz, If I Forget, Isolde, Red Light Winter, Film and Television; Billions, Bull, Homeland, Jon Benjamin Has a Van, The Wizard of Lies, A Mighty Heart, and The Post.
Jen Rosenblit makes performances in New York City and Berlin surrounding architectures, bodies and ideas concerned with problems that arise inside of agendas for togetherness. Rosenblit’s works lean toward the uncanny and maintenance of care, locating ways of being together amidst impossible spaces. The research process tracks the tangential rather than the linear, looking for meaning as it emerges between things.
Rosenblit has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K. Burns and Philipp Gehmacher. Recent works include I’m Gonna Need Another One(2018-2019 co-production between Sophiensaele(DE) and The Chocolate Factory Theater(NYC)), Everything Fits In The Room( a 2017 collaboration with Simone Aughterlony, HAU Hebbel am Ufer), Swivel Spot (2017, The Kitchen), Clap Hands (2016, The Invisible Dog/New York Live Arts), a Natural dance (2014, The Kitchen).
Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2018 Atelier Mondial Artist-in-Residence in Basel, Switzerland, a 2015-16 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a 2014-2015 Workspace Artist through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a recipient of a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, a 2013 Fellow at Insel Hombroich (Nuese, Germany) and a recipient of the 2012 Grant to Artists from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. www.jenrosenblit.net
Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based and supported in Zurich and Berlin, working predominantly in dance and performance contexts. Over more than a decade, Simone has been devising and producing choreographic works. As a performer, she has worked with artists such as Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Forced Entertainment and Jorge León, and amongst others. In 2015, she collaborated with artists Antonija Livingstone and Hahn Rowe in a piece titled Supernatural, which premiered in American Realness. In the same year, she devised a performance project with Jorge León titled Uni*Form, which premiered at Zuercher Theater Spektakel. She worked together with Jen Rosenblit in Everything Fits in the Room, a commission from HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, premiered in 2017. Alongside several of these works, she is touring the works Compass and Maintaining Stranger which emerged from her research on conceptions of 'the stranger’. While engaging with alternative forms of kinship in the process, new constellations of family emerge as possibilities for reconfiguring a culture of togetherness that foster both familiar and unknown quantities. Her works playfully compose with representation and its saturation, seeping into and embracing the phenomenology of mis-recognition and the absurd. Simone approaches the performance genre as a world-building practice where she navigates the contradiction between the domination of desire alongside the agency of all elements. www.aughterlony.com