Spotlight on... Jenna Levine

Author: Ashley Gamell

Jenna Levine '07.5 is Fine Arts major from Chicago. Levine spent the last academic year in London at Central Saint Martin's College exploring her interests in dance, photography, video, painting and other multimedia art. The Campus caught up with Levine to talk about life in London and the continuation of her art in her last semester at the College.



The Middlebury Campus: Where were you studying for the past year, and where were you living?

Jenna Levine: I was living for one year in London, England, studying at Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design, which is in central London, a very active and fun neighborhood. I was living in the East End, which is hugely populated by artists.



TC: What was the context in which you did dance video work? Was it an independent project, or was it part of your coursework?

JL: There actually are no courses at Central Saint Martin's. The British education system is very different, particularly regarding the arts. I was doing a lot installation sculpture and video work, combining various mixed media. My teachers noticed that any time I presented the work it was in a very performative way, and they encouraged me to expand on that. I began collaborating with a photographer, Luke Turner, who had never done video work before. We staged some pretty funky things - very experimental, seemingly irrational - but they had a lot of neat layering to them.



TC: Can you describe one of those collaborative performances?

JL: To explore a break from conventional dance, I created, in collaboration with my classmate, Luke Turner, a series of dances that investigated the absurd. The environment we chose is a fabulous place along the south bank of The Thames by The National Theatre, a brutalist building - all cement, very hard lines - whose shape is reminiscent of that of a boat. The boat-like front alluded to my striped costume, which was supposed to reference the "dazzle" war boats of World War I, which were painted in a kind of early camouflage to confuse the enemy. We thought it would be fun to explore that idea of camouflage through the movement and on the space of the body. We went out there at around five-thirty in the morning in March. The austere environment and the icy cold morning - you can see my breath in the film - lent a lot to the shaping and movement of my organic body. [The performance] was totally improvised, one hour of filming. The movement turned out almost machine-like and robotic - the space, the costume, and my body seemed both human and machine.

For the piece, we chose Stravinsky's "Piano Rag Music" because it was happening around the same time as the World War I camouflage boats and also seemed to continue the mechanic theme - it's been talked about as all the elements of jazz put through some kind of machine and stretched. The Stravinsky music was picked after the performance, so the job of Luke Turner was to turn an hour's worth of footage into something that looks like it's made for the Stravinsky piece. We continued working that way. Although, for the most part, I was trying to work without music - trying to draw on other qualities such as the atmosphere or environment and, of course, my costumes.



TC: What draws you to dance in the video form as opposed to live performance?

JL: Live performance is amazing because there is so much energy and so much that is unpredictable - things can go wrong, things can evolve. When something is fixed on tape, everything has already been decided. Nevertheless, what is so exciting about video is that you can do dance at any time, at any location and nobody even has to be there, but you can still share it.



TC: What did you find inspiring about London? Was there a different sort of stimulation you received from the artists you were studying with, your surroundings and the city itself?

JL: London is just such an amazing place because there is so much going on. The hard thing was, when you go to galleries at least three times a week, to decide what it is that you are actually attracted to and what it is that you yourself want to make. I think that is why my work has become so multi-layered and mixed-media. I love painting. I love moving. I try to find a way to put them all together to create a complex, layered work.



TC: Who are some of the artists you look up to and the main influences on your work:

JL: Right now I'm really interested in a lot of the Performance Space artists. Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker is one of my absolute favorites. She has done some work for video with Thierry De Mey. It has a interesting quality because it is dance made for video, so it really focuses on the space. You get control of the eye of the viewer, the timing, depth of field - all of these spacial relationships.



TC: What are your plans for continuing this work during your last semester here at Middlebury?

JL: I want to do work on my own and engage other students. On Saturday, an impromptu group of us went down to the organic garden at 5 p.m. to catch some of the "magic hour" light. There were both new and more experienced dancers, and we were all very new to each other. I had imagined something more choreographed and clear, but people were sort of ecstatic and just playing. That was a really fabulous experience. Now, I am going to start working with [the footage] I have. We were out there for four hours. There are a couple more projects I plan to do throughout the term that are going to include other dancers.



TC: Are there any particular subjects or issues that you would say your work tackles?

JL: Certainly. I am really using the visual arts as a way to look at dance. I like to explore non-normative types of movement and bring a little more consciousness to the way we move, the way we interact with others. There are so many exciting things happening in the world, the most subtle things. When you start looking at art you uncover so many of these subtleties. As a dancer, you have so much choice for response, because you need nothing more than your body to react.