03.02.2022 | 19:00

Please note: Pre-register with Sabine Palm, sabine.palm(at)abk-stuttgart.de. Alarm level I: 2G, for alarm level II: 2G+

Noise engulfs the insides. The room begins. Wait. The walls throb with the pressures of an immodest sound system. The messy, contingent conditions where darkness and dispersion (or excess?) conspire. Wait. Bodies, suspended in motion, fall in and out. An exceptional gesture of shattering and being shattered. Wait. A swerve between forms, against containment. An on-going oscillation between unruliness and turbulence, between falling and dancing.

A deconstruction, or a blurring, performed with students from the MFA Body, Theory and Poetics of the Performative at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, this presentation solicits and challenges the theater’s capacity to house, to hold the general structure of being a problem, and to renew our sensual sociality, our never-ending bodily study of dis/place/ment and dis/order.

Niall Jonesholds the Fellowship for Performance & Co-Teaching in the winter semester 2021/22. This collaborative fellowship between ABK Stuttgart and Akademie Schloss Solitude was established in 2013 by Prof. Dr. Cristina Gómez Barrio & Prof. Wolfgang Mayer (aka Discoteca Flaming Star) from the MFA Body, Theory and Poetics of the Performative at ABK Stuttgart. Within the framework of this agreement, artists such as Sílvia das Fadas, Maria Salgado, Teresa Solar Abboud have already been fellows at both institutions.

Niall Jones constructs, inhabits, and explores the theater as a mode and location of instabilities. Working through an ongoing fascination with labor, temporality, and fantasy, Jones creates immersive, liminal densities – traces and thresholds – that enact practices of incompleteness and refusal. His work obsesses over the fragility of matter, fugitive presences, and collective intimacies.

Niall received a Bessie Award nomination for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer in 2017 and, more recently, a 2021 Grants-To-Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Recent works include: A Work for Others at The Kitchen OnScreen (2021); Fantasies in Low Fade at Chocolate Factory Theater, New York City (2019); Sis Minor: The Preliminary Studies at Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (2018); Sis Minor, in Fall at Abrons Arts Center, New York City (2018) and Splendor #3 at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, New York City (2017).

He has performed in works by Maria Hassabi, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson, Cynthia Oliver, Tere O’Connor, Jen Rosenblit/Simone Aughterlony, David Gordon, Emily Wexler, Walter Dundervill, Regina Rocke, Anne Imhof, Yve Laris Cohen, and Ryan McNamara.

Jones received a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches at the University of the Arts School of Dance in Philadelphia, where he is also Producer and Co-Curator of The School for Temporary Liveness (Vol. 1 & 2).

(Text: Niall Jones with additions by AM Sabine Palm)

#Background information
The cooperation fellowship between the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and Akademie Schloss Solitude was established in the year 2013. Prof. Dr. Cristina Gómez Barrio & Prof. Wolfgang Mayer – (aka  Discoteca Flaming Star) are hosting this cooperation from the side of the Stuttgart State Academy within their chair (former Intermedia Arts until 2019, now MFA “Körper, Theorie & die Poetik des Performativen”, short KTPP, in English “Body, Theory and the Poetics of the Performative”). The effort of this cooperation is to create a frame in which a Solitude fellow and the ABK students at the MFA KTPP can have an enriching encounter- while preserving each of the institutional mandates; as well as linking the international background of Solitude with the city of Stuttgart, through one of its artistic educational institutions.