LJ Legacy Talks | Lisa Race and Kendra Portier

Lion's Jaw is proud to be collaborating with some legends of u.s. dance during quarantine in a series of conversations about lineage, legacy and personal history. The Lion's Jaw Legacy Talks are 30-60 min. conversations between dance-artists and their students/colleagues/collaborators that help us look at and remember dance-history through their eyes. Here dance-artists and longtime colleagues Lisa Race and Kendra Portier have a discussion about dance and legacy. (cameo by David Dorfman) LISA RACE Lisa Race spent much of her career as a performer, teacher and choreographer in New York before heading north to Connecticut. She received a Bessie in 1995 as a member of David Dorfman Dance (1989-2000) and continues as a guest with the company. Her work has been seen at the former DTW, Danspace Project, Dancenow and MR at the Judson Church in NYC. Race is an Associate Professor of Dance at Connecticut College, having joined the faculty in 2007 after receiving an MFA in Dance from Hollins University/ADF. She has given workshops and/or made dances at many destinations around the country and beyond, including ImpulsTanz (Austria), Kalamata Festival (Greece), France, Denmark, England, Hong Kong, Argentina, Sweden, Finland and Russia, as well as at the Bates and American Dance Festivals. Race’s film collaboration with Shawn Hove, Folded, has been screened at the Sans Souci Festival, Dance For Reel, and Light Moves Festival of Screendance. KENDRA PORTIER I am obsessed with the expansive and poetic potential of the moving body. The dances I make meld discovery and expression into live performance experiences. The work is messy, methodical, personal, conceptual, otherworldly, odd, and human. For me, making dance is beautifully alchemical and frustratingly vulnerable. Each process is an attempt to make sense of the world, and myself in it; a visceral reckoning in dance form. I am haunted by basic human themes and attracted to concepts often considered metaphysical or arcane. This leads me to explore concepts, such as Color Theory, familial trauma, sensorium, the physics and psychics of magenta, absence, and smog. Movement vacillates from rigorous banalities, like overdone hugs and excessive flapping, to wild off-kiltering that has the performers skillfully plummeting and spiraling through space. Design elements are in an evocative partnership with the movement-  a moment of stillness appears to flutter under a forest of hot pink neon lights or a touch becomes the sound of an egg cracking. Doing this work requires me to thwart habit, unsettle any fixed aesthetic, and reconsider my philosophies. I work with artists, diverse in their training, history, body, and philosophy. I do this to enrich the work, myself, and the communal practices I promote in and beyond the studio. Our work is meant to be shared - experienced and tested together; a cyclical endeavor from studio, page, performance, and every day.

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