Jennifer Polins, 46, of Northampton, is a teacher, curator, dance maker and performance artist. Her professional career began at 16, with the Joffrey Ballet Company, then led her to Europe for many years. When she returned to the United States, in 1998, she co-founded Wire Monkey Dance in Holyoke, with Saliq Francis Savage. Her newest endeavor is the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton, created in 2015, where she offers classes for youth and adults, hosts movement and theater groups and curates performance events with local and international artists. She’s also directing a new pre-professional dance company, The Hatchery.
Hampshire Life: What is your creative process like?
Jennifer Polins: Sometimes I have a clear image or concept to start from, and sometimes I take as much time as I can to improvise without knowing. This process always leads to threads of material that I weave together. I do a lot of improvisational scores on stage, work that has basic structures of focus, frames of time and specific intentions but each performance can have a very different nature. I love that.
H.L.: How do you know you’re on the right track?
J.P.: Editing is one of the most interesting parts of the creative process for me — distilling, or uncovering like an archeological dig, the essence of the material, and letting go of things I think are so important, but that actually don’t need to be visible in the final product. A lot of live performance making is choosing what is public and what is private.
H.L.: What do you do when you get stuck?
J.P.: I often try including where I am stuck by generating materials that includes the stuckness. Sometimes I change focus, listen to music or read an article or go for a hike and things open again. Driving in the car always seems to unlock my perceptions and heighten my state of inspiration and hope.
H.L.: How do you know when the work is done?
J.P.: Often, I feel like I am making different versions of the same piece for years. It is a great feeling when there is a clear completion of a work. I often change the order of the parts of a dance, so that the place I started gets inserted in the middle, the end becomes the beginning. Sometimes an ending is the clearest image I have and the goal is to expand the dance from the place of completion.
H.L.: How much of your current artistic aesthetic is shaped from survival rather then a clear creative vision, and is there a difference between those two things?
J.P.: I have to adapt to the groups I work with. It is rare to work with the same group for longer then a year or two and often I am commissioned to work at universities or high schools that have different levels of dancers in the same group. I love creating work for store-fronts or different sites, gallery spaces and work in proscenium theaters.
It was great to work in ballet and modern companies in the ’80s and ’90s, where the level of dancers was high, when there was funding and space and time to create. But, choosing to work in the free scene was a conscious choice for me — to move into a more realistic economy — to be able to offer my work to audiences and performers who might not have access to the opera house or the expensive ballet school.
— Kathleen Mellen
Polins says she considers the entire season at SCDT “my performance work.”
French performance artist and juggler Jorg Mullerfrom will do a showing of his work “TUBES” Sept 30, 7-8 p.m.
“HUT,” a curated series of performances that brings dance, poetry, film and visual artists together to share work, takes place Oct. 1, Nov. 5, and Dec 3. at 8 p.m.
Kyle Ahmed Bukhari of New York City will present a performative lecture on Yvonne Rainer and Richard Serra Oct. 14 at 7 p.m.
“WIP,” a new in-process dance series, takes place Oct. 23 and Nov. 20 at 8 p.m.
“RIFF TALKS— IDENTITY IN PERFORMANCE” takes place Nov. 11-13, with artists from New York, Northampton and Amsterdam.
The Hatchery will premiere works by Polins and other area artists Dec. 16-17 at 7 p.m.
For information, visit scdtnoho.com.