Bird Brain Tour One: The Gray Whale Migration, 2001; photos by Andy Kuno [Enlarge in New Window]

Jennifer Monson: Bird Brain

Jennifer Monson's Bird Brain is ambitious in ways that transcend the field of dance. "I want to create a global community on my own terms," she says. At present, this choreographer's community includes birds, beasts, natural scientists, professional dancers, and regular folks, and what holds it together is the migration of a species across continents, cultures, and climates.

Bird Brain is that name Monson gives to a vast, multi-year project that combines several dance works with education and research components. Bird Brain will take the choreographer from Maine to Venezuela, from the Arctic Circle to West Africa, with free outdoor performances in American and European cities and natural areas along the way.

The Brooklyn-based Monson has been choreographing for 20 years and was honored with a Bessie Award for 1997's Sender, as well as for sustained achievement. Her dances have influenced a generation of younger choreographers, combining a rigorous formal investigation with an athletic, human, sometimes playfully awkward quality that stems from a deep awareness of rhythm and musicality. As described by Apollinaire Scher in The New York Times, "When Ms. Monson awakens us to the strangeness of human movement, she simultaneously retrieves nature's meaningless wildness."

The initial performance of Bird Brain was dubbed The Pigeon Project and presented at New York City's Performance Space 122 in 2000. "I allowed myself to be very literal in developing movement," Monson recalls. The result was an evening-length dance for three performers, their layered movements at times filling the space with what seemed like flight, at times enacting a stationary series of gestures that mimicked the nervous curiosity of a city pigeon on the trail of crumbs.

Bird Brain was followed in 2001 by the first of Monson's four projected Migration Tours, each of which traces the path of a particular species. Last year's tour followed gray whales along the Pacific coast of the Americas, from Mexico to Vancouver. At each stop along the way, Monson and three dancers performed for school groups and at environmental preserves and parks, and also met with scientists doing field research on migration. The website www.birdbraindance.org tracked the whales and the dancers with video footage and journal entries. The choreographer is currently planning the next tour, which will follow osprey from Northern Maine to Venezuela.

One of the most revelatory aspects of Bird Brain is Monson's ability to turn a scientific process into an artistic one. "I have been trying to apply the rigor of scientific data collection to my dance-making," she explains, "and then use it to understand my imagination." In the studio, Monson and her dancers work with a structured improvisational score, and then make written maps of each other's movement, similar to the way a scientist might trace the path of a flock. Later the maps are used to further develop the choreography, and Monson ends up with what she calls 'Navigational Dances.' It is a method she also uses with students. "I had one kid at an elementary school in San Pedro, CA who said, 'I never knew dance could be like this! I thought you had to copy what the teacher did,'" Monson recalls. "And soon he was making these beautiful dances."

On the Migration Tours the relationship to science is more direct, as data gathered by scientists who track the birds can dictate elements of the live performances. For example, the birds may come across bad weather, rest or feed in an urban setting, or cross a body of water; these possibilities will directly iinfluence the structure of the performances that take place on the tour.

Bird Brain draws parallels between animal travel and the paths of information, between the body and technology. "Migration is about continuity, globally," Monson explains. "These birds make contact with more parts of the earth than most of us could ever dream of. Their migratory web parallels information webs in a material, complex, and changing way." Or, as scientist Scott Wiedensaul says in his book Living on the Wind -- a quote Monson likes to repeat: "Bird migration is the one truly unifying natural phenomenon in the world."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Dance | Environment | Science & Technology | New York | 2000