{"id":235,"date":"2015-08-07T11:07:58","date_gmt":"2015-08-07T15:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jeaninedurning.com\/?page_id=235"},"modified":"2019-12-27T11:25:41","modified_gmt":"2019-12-27T16:25:41","slug":"to-being","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jeaninedurning.com\/?page_id=235","title":{"rendered":"To Being"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
“It is like watching a trapped animal struggle, the sheer force of that nonverbal holding-on. I can\u2019t tell the direction of the energy\u2014whether she is taking or giving. I try to offer her some of mine so she can keep going, but I don\u2019t know if she wants it. In that moment, I experience being<\/em> as an active state. Finally, after years of graduate-school discussions that yielded only vague explanations, I understand the meaning of ontology.” <\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Jaime Shearn Coan, The Brooklyn Rail<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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“How will they get themselves out of this? I kept wondering that … and not because I wanted it to end. This marathon of a dance enmeshes the dancers so wholly in doing, doing, doing that you can\u2019t imagine them being done. It\u2019s like watching people live, right in the thick of passing time.” <\/span><\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Siobhan Burke, The New York Times<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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“Their dance appears to obliterate thought.”<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Rennie McDougal, Culturebot
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To Being<\/em><\/strong> is a choreography of persistence in the heart of jeopardy and precarity: the body continues in ongoing change, relations transform, meanings proliferate and fade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A companion work to Durning\u2019s acclaimed solo performance practice, inging<\/em>, To Being<\/em><\/strong> is based on the decidedly chosen practice of nonstopping \u2014 always moving absent destination\u2014 always becoming, never arriving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A psychosocial experiment, To Being<\/em><\/strong> opens to a landscape where radically divergent desires converge and empathy unfolds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Being<\/em><\/strong> is dance as both ontological inquiry and homage, a force against the absolute, the nameable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Being<\/em><\/strong> is a composition of endurance, a sonata of devotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Being<\/em><\/strong> is an unending search for an imperative relationship to movement in which dichotomies between self and other, material and immaterial, thought and action, incessantly dissolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But more than anything else, To Being<\/em> <\/strong>asks: What\u2019s at stake? Where\u2019s the end? How can we give more when all we feel is that we’ve met our limit?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Created by Jeanine Durning<\/strong> with Julian Barnett<\/strong> and Molly Poerstel<\/strong>. Directed by Jeanine Durning<\/strong>. Performed by Julian Barnett<\/strong>, Jeanine Durning<\/strong>, and Molly Poerstel<\/strong>. Sound by Tian Rotteveel<\/strong>. Lighting by Joe Levasseur<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Being<\/em><\/strong> premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater, NYC, September 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n