THE DUMPS (T.B.D. Winter 2025)
collaboration with Simone Aughterlony
A place on the precipice of collapse and transition, the work eroticises architectures that embrace aging and
decay amidst and passing through this abandoned terrain. A fragile and worn territory comes with the promise of collision, being in and getting in the way of progress by way of a communal slippage where things are in varying processes of coming down together.
Concept: Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony
Simone Aughterlony, Jen Rosenblit
Speculative architect: Li Tavor
Light design: Joseph Wegmann
Technical management: Jan Olieslagers
Dramaturgical advice: Felipe Ribeiro
Image: Simon Courchel
Administration / production: Umar Hallawi
Production: Imbricated Real
Production support: Diana Paiva/High Expectations
Support: Stadt Zürich Kultur, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich
Gruppenförderung, Shedhalle, Migros Kulturprozent Zurich
Photo credits: Simon Courchel
Thank you: Schauspielhaus Zürich, Pascal Leutwyler, Lucie Tuma, Isabel Lewis.
With support from: The Invisible Dog Art Center, Center For Performance Research
ElseWhere Rhapsody, 2024
ElseWhere Rhapsody is a production of Jen Rosenblit with support from La Becque Artist Residency. Co-Producers: Tanzfabrik Berlin, DE / Tanzquartier Wien, AT / Arsenic, Lausanne, CH / Théâtre Saint-Gervais, CH / La Bellone, BE / BUDA Arts Center, BE
Elsewhere is somewhere that is not here, it by definition is somewhere else.” Jen Rosenblit's philosophical excavations explore the phenomenology and potential of places and things that exist out of bounds and focus, and often incomplete. In four loose chapters and carried by the polyphonic ballads of the live band, this Elsewhere Rhapsody takes us along a poetic text through crumbling landscapes and flawed formations. A public auction of something not present provides the conceptual framework for negotiating value and worth as it relates to desire. With Colin Self as auctioneer and in the spirit of "going, going, gone...", Jen Rosenblit's new creation looks at the eroticism of wanting, the familiarity of unavailability, and the repetition that helps us forget.
Concept, Text and Performance: Jen Rosenblit
Sound Design and Performance: Gærald Kurdian
Song Composition and Performance: Li Tavor
Performance and Monologue: Colin Self
Light Design: Joseph Wegmann
Technical Direction and Performance Technician: Thibault Villard
Technical Assistance: Anton Gerzina
Research Assistance: Alex Piasente and Chiara Pagano
Production: Diana Paiva / high expectations
Video and Editing: Daphna Keenan
Photo credits: Simon Courchel
*In process table reading at La Becque Artists Residency, Vevey, CH September 2023
Everybody's Fantasy
a co-production with Arsenic – Centre d’art scénique contemporain (CH), Tanznacht Berlin (DE), TanzQuartier Vienna (AT).
A performance work after Gertrude Stein’s 1937 Everybody’s Autobiography which is after The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written by Stein in 1933 in the guise of an autobiography. Considering the biographical, the life-lived as as an accessible format for others to enter, visit or witness with care and understanding, this work looks toward what would happen, what we could anticipate happening again and the fantasy that rests just beside. If gathering or the commons are something of the past, the work cultivates a perfume of “rehearsals for paradise” where gathering is not bound to inclusion or exclusion. We consider that place is where no one belongs but where many can exist. The work imagines a kind of temporary-holding in place of ownership, a way to take responsibility and take care inclusive of the ability to walk away, to depart, to end, to let a thing exist beyond our grasp, beyond our collection and maintenance of it. The work follows desire knowing that it is not bound to sense or sensibility.
Concept, Text, Performance: Jen Rosenblit
Sound Design and Performance: Gerald Kurdian
Sound Design and Performance: Li Tavor
Costume: Saša Kovačević
Recorded Vocals: Simone Aughterlony
Light Design: Enrico D. Wey
Early Dramaturgical care: Merel Heering
Lazy Susan/Rotating Stage design: Jonas Maria Droste
Production and Administration: Culture on a Budget
Photo Credits: Ink Agop
Supported by the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (NPN) Coproduction Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media of Germany. Residency support by Danse & Dramaturgie, an initiative by Théâtre Sévelin 36, in association with Dampfzentrale Bern, Tanzhaus Zürich, TU-Théâtre de l'Usine, ROXY Birsfelden, with the financial support of Pro Helvetia and SSA Société Suisse des Auteurs
I'm Gonna Need Another One, 2018
Parts of things are in the painful process of becoming whole things themselves. I’m Gonna Need Another One troubles the authentic or singular self by elevating the inevitability of things falling apart. The work situates itself within the proximity of twelve green foam blocks as they leave dusty traces, eventually crumble and disappear in form. Rosenblit stands in as Performer, Herself, as well as multiple figures which speak to problems for the preparation for future strategies and ways of organizing how we come to know where and who we are. From a Sous Chef, to Chiron: the Greek God of pain known for the acknowledgment of the wound on his animal leg, a Wheat Farmer, a Soldier, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and a Compulsive Re-arranger of Furniture, the figures orient and reorient the work as we get lost in the multiplicity of this solo body, performing a strategy of endurance based on distraction. A picnic occurs, a small wheat field gets cultivated and for one moment, this imitation land obscures the figure of the body. A monologue takes us through profiles of the figures and finally opens up to include a short pause to speak about things that we like. We are left with a floating map without landmarks, an illegible city plan, suggesting that being lost is a valid location.
Concept, Text, Performance: Jen Rosenblit
Light and Technical Direction: Yoshi Geottgens
Sound Design and Live Performance: Gerald Kurdian
Dramaturgie: Kuchar & Co / Adham Hafez and Adam Kucharski, Jay Scheib
Research and Photography: Simon Courchel
Assistant: Lulu Obermayer
Chess Floor: Christopher Füllemann
Apron: Quinn Czejkowski
Metal Work: Abigail Lloyd / Pine Pine Studio
German Translation: Julia Schell / für Kunst und Komma
French Translation: Lucile Dupraz
Production Management: MiCA / Katharina Meyer and Raisa Kröger
Photo credits: Simon Courchel
A production by Jen Rosenblit. Funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds. In cooperation with The Chocolate Factory Theater and Sophiensaele, with support from Atelier Mondial.
Swivel Spot, 2017
NYC Premiere, The Kitchen
Piles of crushed peanuts shells, shaved grass, a grim reaper and an imaginary bull fight all inside the constant maintenance of a plastic covered space. Swivel Spot is concerned with preservation. It is clear that something is gone, haunting the area are the remains, a skeleton of logic from something that no longer applies. Still, these things don’t just go away. We hover in this spot, an area likened to a dump, a graveyard for parts or a
recycling shed. Each encounter offers what feels monumental without reason; a leaking, a cracking open, momentary ramming, a passageway as if with the right amount of petting, we might arrive in that afterlife or submit to that underworld. We are three because two would be too few and together, we separately approach aloneness.
Concept: Jen Rosenblit
Performance and Creation: Jen Rosenblit and Geo Wyeth
Sound: Geo Wyeth
Lighting: Nica Ross
Dramaturgy: Joshua Lubin-Levy
Production and Performance Support: alexia welch
Multipurpose Tool and Podium
Fabrication: Abigail Lloyd
Jacket: Quinn Czejkowski
Lighting Assistant: Andrew Hunt
Management / Producer: Alexandra Rosenberg
Everything Fits In The Room, 2017
Berlin Premiere District, A commission and co-production by HAU Hebbel am Ufer.
The fundamentals are there. There is a window only it won’t be accessible in quite the same way or we simply won’t see the view through it in this configuration.
There are doors still, of course, and they sit in the walls for the most part. The walls no longer just support the structure but enact their own participation. We will do the thing we always do of adjusting across the room, bringing all parts with us. The fit is good somehow, no matter the quantity or persuasion.
Don’t worry, we will still fuck over there in the corner. Although it might be called something else entirely, we will potentially foster other resemblances of lovemaking that might be now known as feeding, bathing or recycling. The roof is still the roof. It functions as it did only we imagine seeing small apertures, spots of deterioration where the light seeps through and takes volume. It is no longer important if this light is artificial or natural.
Inside the room, dungeon-esque encounters and ordinary domestic lingering exercise a politic that comes with care taking, danger and amnesia. Aughterlony and Rosenblit alongside Gutierrez and Self on sound, maintain a complicated relationship to order that encourages cracks and leaks inside architectures for gathering. A free-standing wall, a roaming kitchen island and decaying bodies are part of a disruptive ecology that asks for constant adjustment. Wall fixtures like hooks, rope, chain, and clamps offer possibilities of adjusting. A chair gets bound, a ladder, bones, witches on site, skins, zest of grapefruit at room temperature. The fixtures hold no opinion for who or what clings to them. Rhythmic sorcery drives the effort despite the un-governability of ingredients. Is this a construction site or a cooking show? There remains a curiosity of how each thing fits. Everything fits but at what cost? The room offers an expanded horizon, no longer obliged to rid oneself of the things that supposedly suspend and delay progress.
Concept, Performance: Simone Aughterlony, Jen Rosenblit
Composition, Soundbody: Miguel Gutierrez, Colin Self
Guest Performer: Sheena McGrandles (Berlin premiere)
Light Installation: Florian Bach
Music Kitchen Sculpture: Nik Emch
Dramaturgical advice: Jorge León, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Anna Mülter, Saša Bozic
Technical Director: Marie Prédour
Production Assistent: Dagmar Bock
Production Management: Sina Kießling
Administration: Karin Erdmann
Diffusion: Alexandra Wellensiek Early
Sound Research: Tami T
Production: Verein für allgemeines Wohl
Co-production: Gessnerallee Zürich, Arsenic - Lausanne
Supported by: City of Zurich, Canton of Zurich Fachstelle Kultur und Pro Helvetia – Swiss Cultural Foundation, Tanzhaus Zurich, ImpulsTanz Wien, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Fête de la Danse - Genev, Tanzhaus Zurich, George and Jenny Bloch Foundation
Photo credits (1,3): Venice Theatre Biennale
Photo Credits (2): Nadja Krueger
Created in the frame of "Utopian Realities", a co-production of HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of "100 Years of Now", curated by HAU Hebbel am Ufer.
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Clap Hands, 2016
Clap Hands is a mating call, an over-crowded solo, looking to hail, disguise, displace, reveal and track the disappearance of the body. A large stack of fuchsia felt installs the space. Meaning hovers and a still-life emerges. Clap Hands is concerned with the politics of coming together as we maintain autonomy. Something is lost or forgotten, but we contin- ue with the burden of carrying on. How can we consolidate a skeleton of logic through our individual labors? Can we locate intimacy in non-hu- man forms?
Clapping hands is a phenomenon we do together, to celebrate, mark or culminate. Clap Hands is something we have to sit alone with, to recall being together.
Concept: Jen Rosenblit
Performers: Effie Bowen, Andy Kobilka, Jen Rosenblit
Performance and production support: alexia welch
Sound: Admanda Kobilka
Lighting: Elliott Jenetopulos Early
Research support: Addys Gonzalez
Management/Producer: Alexandra Rosenberg
Photo credits: Maria Baranova and Ryan MacNamara