New work: RUPTURE
FEBRUARY 8 – 10, 2007 @ 8:30; FEBRUARY 11, 2007 @ 7:30
Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street [at 2nd Avenue]

Jill Sigman makes her first full evening appearance at Danspace Project with RUPTURE, a multi-media dance for five performers. RUPTURE is a feverish dream, a strange requiem, an Alice in Wonderland story in a time of disorder. Set in a charged landscape that includes hundreds of broken eggshells, the work weaves together the story of an acute calf injury with Sigman’s travels in India, Berlin, and New Orleans to explore breaking and healing on personal, architectural, and global scales. Conceived as a solo with chorus, RUPTURE is danced by choreographer Jill Sigman with Toby Billowitz, Donna Costello, Hilary Maia Grubb, and Jennifer Sydor. The work is set to an original score for voice and electronics performed live by Kristin Norderval, with lighting and set design by Jonathan Belcher, costumes by Naoko Nagata, live video mixing by Katherine Liberovskaya, and video edited by Jill Sigman and Lisa Niedermeyer.

For tickets and performance information visit
The creation of Rupture has been made possible, in part, with funds from the Danspace Project 2006-2007 Commissioning Initiative with support from the Jerome Foundation; as well as public commissioning funds from the Dance Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council MOVE:133 Beekman Residency in space generously donated by General Growth Properties, Inc.; a Choreographic Fellowship at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University; and support from the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation; The Bay and Paul Foundations; The Movement Research Artist Residency Project, funded in part by the Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund; TAKT Kunstprojektraum in Berlin, Germany; the Kri Foundation in New Delhi, India; a residency at Earthdance; and the jill sigman/thinkdance INSIDE Commissioning Club.

Be a part of RUPTURE

As part of the process of creating RUPTURE, Jill Sigman is collecting answers to the following 3 questions:

1) What have you broken?

2) What have you lost?

3) How do you want to die?

Answers will be written anonymously on broken eggshells which will form part of the set for RUPTURE. To participate, email your answers to one or more of the questions to:
These questions are also being disseminated on 10,000 tiny cards as a RUPTURE Secret Message Campaign. Jill has been launching Secret Message Campaigns since 2004 when she wrote four texts about why she creates experimental dance, printed them on small pieces of paper, and left 200 of them around New York City in phone booths, subways, taxi cabs, supermarket frozen food cases, and on trees in the park. The original idea was to blur the boundaries between art and everyday life, and to connect anonymously yet intimately with people outside of the usual reach of concert dance.

This is the first Secret Message Campaign that involves a response mechanism and is directly related to a performance. It will allow people who are nowhere near the actual performances to become part of them. To help plant RUPTURE secret message cards in your neighborhood, email:

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Join jill sigman/thinkdance for a Parlor Party to benefit the Danspace Project premiere of RUPTURE

Thursday, January 11, 2007

7:00 pm to 10:00 pm

The home of Susan McClanahan 1088 Park Avenue • Apartment #8E
between East 88th and 89th Streets
New York City

cocktails • hors d’oeuvres • desserts • intrigue
$100 per ticket ($70 tax-deductible)
for questions call 917-445-5170
RSVP
Festive Dress
Thanks to Deborah Life Love Food for their ongoing support and kind contribution

To order tickets contact
If you can't make it to the benefit event but would like to contribute anyway, click here

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Mission

Founded in 1998, jill sigman/thinkdance raises questions through the medium of the body. An experimental dance company based in New York City, jill sigman/thinkdance presents work that exists at the intersection of dance, theater and visual installation, often using non-traditional environments, formats, and ways of engaging the viewer.

The work of jill sigman/thinkdance grows out of Sigman's own history in classical ballet and modern dance, the visual arts, and academic philosophy, and her idiosyncratic style of performance now exists at the intersection of dance, theater and visual installation. Trained extensively in classical ballet at the Joffrey Ballet School and Ballet Center of Brooklyn, Sigman discovered traditional modern dance forms at Princeton University, where she earned a Certificate in Theater and Dance in 1989. Eventually pursuing graduate studies at Princeton in analytic philosophy, Sigman became increasingly interested in linking her continuing work in dance and performance with the philosophical questions she was exploring. Upon completion of her Ph.D. in 1998, she wanted to give people a more visceral experience of thought than the printed word allowed, and formed jill sigman/thinkdance as a vehicle for that intellectual and performative dialogue with audiences.

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About

jill sigman/thinkdance has been produced by such New York venues as Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project (New York on New York), Dancing in the Streets (Dances for Wave Hill), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, P.S.122 (Hothouse), The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and Dixon Place, and has been seen regionally in New Jersey, California, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Iowa. Internationally, Sigman’s work has been performed in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, and most recently in India at the invitation of the American Embassy in New Delhi.

jill sigman/thinkdance has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Puffin Foundation, the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, and the Kri Foundation (New Delhi); space grants from The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, Gina Gibney/Studio 5-2, and Princeton University; a Gina Gibney Dance “Women at Work” Award for Choreographic Achievement; and two Swarthmore Project Residencies for Choreographers and Dancers from Swarthmore College. Works have been commissioned by Dixon Place (2004), University of Iowa “Dancers in Company” (2004), the Brooklyn-based multi-arts collective Red Dive (2003), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (2001), The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center (2001), and Dancing in the Streets (1999). In 2005, Sigman was one of the first Resdient Artists of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s MOVE Residency Program and a Choreographic Fellow in residence at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center at Florida State University. She is currently a Movement Research Artist in Residence (2005-2007).

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Contact

For more information on jill sigman/thinkdance touring, writing, teaching, residencies, past events, funding history, press and photography, please contact

All information will be available on our new site in spring 2007.

For information about our upcoming benefit contact

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