I am Also - Monte

I am Also-Monte, is a collaborative solo version of the performance project, I am Also. This solo investigates the importance of the process of the dancer, and how their memories affect the authorship of a dance-maker. Through the life stories of house dancer, and improviser, Monte Jones, I am Also-Monte, reveals how the memory of the dancer is an immediate action that both consciously and subconsciously infiltrates the work of the choreographer. Therefore, separating dancers from the hierarchy of the choreographer’s story and placing their bodies at the center of their own story.
FUNDING
I Am Also – Monte is commissioned by the Abrons Arts Center, and was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Special thanks to Carrie Hughes of Chesterfield Dance Center, in Richmond, Virginia.

Photo by Megan Lee.
I am Also, is a theatrical dance project created by Poerstel that reckons with the immediate nature of bodily memory. The cumulative research of this process has evolved into an auto-ethnographic dance work that both embraces and interrogates the interconnectedness of dance lineage, friendship, and our pasts. Therefore exposing the persistent and excessive power of past as present action. One that reflects, as Brain Massumi states in his book Affect Theory, “an inheritance of the past” with the ability to “catapult” into present time.

Read about the process and research behind this work in the I am Also blog.

Working with Eleanor on I am Also - Eleanor, has left me feeling like I

have come home and that I am also in some newly chartered territory.

Feeling ready to let go of an old way of working, but also feeling attached to the past.

Choosing to reference my past work whenever the materials come out of me.

It is like I am always making a different dance but with the same materials.

I am feeling like I am at home with Eleanor. Our shared memories of working together these past 12 years are deep.

I met Eleanor at Bates Dance Festival. She was a student and I was with a group who was teaching and performing there.

She was smiling and tall and grounded. I can see her now in the auditorium…