Ivy Baldwin Dance + Jeanine Durning

WORLD  PREMIERE

“Baldwin is a collagist—a bit of absurdist humor here, a surge of violence there.” – The New Yorker

“There is some invisible force permeating from Durning, an energy of generosity and urgency. She is “on the brink”. A woman under the influence.” – Culturebot

ABOUT THE WORK

NYU Skirball unveils a world premiere double bill featuring bold new works from two of contemporary dance’s most fearless voices: Ivy Baldwin and Jeanine Durning. Each choreographer takes the stage with a distinct vision, Baldwin with her rigorously inventive physical landscapes, and Durning with her radical experiments in movement and language, together offering a night of unforgettable contrasts and cutting-edge performance.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ivy Baldwin is a NY-based choreographer, performer, teacher, and founder of Ivy Baldwin Dance. Since 1999, her work has been commissioned in the U.S. by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM Next Wave Festival), The Philip Johnson Glass House (CT), Abrons Arts Center, The Joyce Theater (Joyce Unleashed), The Chocolate Factory, The Wooden Floor (CA), Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, Dixon Place, Dance New Amsterdam, and Manitoga/Russel Wright Design Center. Baldwin is the recipient of many awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2014, Choreography), Bogliasco Foundation (2019, 2012, 2009), MacDowell (2016), Marble House Project (2018), Yaddo (2018), and currently, Gibney Dance In Process (DiP) (2020/21). Baldwin has been an artist-in-residence with BAM, Movement Research, Abrons Arts Center, Hunter College, The Yard, ArtistNe(s)t (Romania), Sugar Salon/Barnard College, Center For Performance Research, Manitoga / Russel Wright Design Center, and 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, and currently, Redtail Arts/Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and Snug Harbor Cultural Center. Baldwin has received support for her work from the Jerome Foundation, William and Karen Tell Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, New York Foundation for the Arts, Dugas Family Foundation, The Fund For Good Work, Lumpkin Family Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant. Baldwin has been a guest artist, choreographer, adjunct faculty member at numerous colleges and universities including Barnard College, New York University, North Carolina School of the Arts, Iowa State University, Hunter College, The New School, Long Island University, Washington University, Rutgers University, and Bard College (2020). Baldwin has also taught at Dance New Amsterdam and BAM/Mark Morris Dance Center in NYC and assisted choreographer David Neumann on An Octoroon (Soho Rep.), Hagoromo (BAM, ADI, Pocantico Center) and Futurity (Soho Rep.). Baldwin holds degrees from the North Carolina School of the Arts (BFA) and New York University Tisch School of the Arts (MFA).

Jeanine Durning is an Alpert Award winning choreographer and performer whose work has been described by The New Yorker as having both “the potential for philosophical revelation and theatrical disaster.” She has been investigating the mobilizing and mutable force of bodies and grappling with their conditions in time, space, and place for over 25 years through experiments in choreography, performance, practice-based research, teaching, and mentoring. Jeanine’s ongoing project, nonstopping, has been the foundation for her embodied research since 2009. She’s performed her signature solo inging (based on her nonstop speaking practice) throughout Europe, across the US, and in Canada on and off since 2010. Jeanine has had the privilege to collaborate with many choreographers, including David Dorfman from 1993-2003, and Deborah Hay since 2005, working as performer, consultant, choreographic assistant, and coach. From 2020-2023, Jeanine worked as Rehearsal Director for Stockholm based contemporary dance company Cullberg, transmitting and touring the dance works of Deborah Hay and Swedish choreographer, Alma Söderberg. Jeanine has been invited to share some of her practices all over the world through teaching, mentoring/advising, and creating choreographies. Her most recent choreographic collaborations were with Candoco Dance Company (London), creating Last Shelter (2021), with Norrdans (Härnösand), creating Everlasting – a new love (2023), and with an independent group of stellar dance artists, creating The Invitation Situation (2023/24). In 2023, with the support of MANCC and The Melon Foundation, she collaborated with writer/editor Jenn Joy and designer Sherri Wasserman on a book project centered around Durning’s practice, nonstopping. Durning is currently working on two artist initiated commissions – one in the US and one in Sweden.

Molly Poerstel is a dance artist whose performing and choreographic career spans twenty-five years. A powerful performer, she has gained recognition over the years for her work with Ivy Baldwin, Hilary Clark, David Dorfman Dance Company, Alex Escalante, Mark Jarecke, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Juliana F. May, Susan Rethorst and Roseanne Spradlin. Her performance collaborations with Jeanine Durning span the length of her career, and include the works:  Half Urge (2003), Out of Kennel, Into a Home (2007), Ex-Memory: waywewere (2009), To being (2015), and A Body Goes (2025). Poerstel was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Sustained Achievement in Dance Performance in 2019 for her collective body of performance work with Ivy Baldwin, Jeanine Durning and Juliana F. May.  Her current choreographic body of works are a trilogy of explorations into embodied memory. I am Also – Monte (2021), was commissioned by Abrons Art Center, Flesh House (2023) at Kestrels in Brooklyn, and her next work, Galactic Ash (working title) considers the in-between spaces of our past and future identities through the complicated binds of grief, ancestry, and lineage. She was a 2015 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and a 2018 BAX Parent Space Grant Recipient. She has taught at The Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, SUNY Purchase Dance Conservatory, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, Dalton School, and the Nanyang School of the Fine Arts in Singapore.

Xenoduo is a creative collective between visual artist Xinan Ran (b.1994, Inner Mongolia, China) and Miguel Alejandro Castillo (b.1993, Caracas, Venezuela). Since 2017, the duo has been collaborating on installation and performance projects exploring cross-cultural and transatlantic homemaking.

Miguel Alejandro Castillo holds a bachelor’s in dance and theater from Middlebury College and an M.F.A in Choreography and Performance from Smith College. Miguel is one of the “25 performers to watch out for in 2024” by Dance Magazine. Miguel has performed in the U.S and internationally in the works of Faye Driscoll, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Jeanine Durning, Maria Hassabi, Tzveta Kassabova, Laurel Jenkins, Delfos Danza Contemporánea, among others. Castillo is a danceWEB scholar at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna in 2021, a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist in 2022-2023, and an Abrons Arts Center artist in residence for 2024- 2025 IG: @love.entirely www.Miguelalejandro.art

Xinan Ran received her MFA from Hunter College (2022) and her BFA from Pratt Institute (2017). Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by New York Magazine’s Matrix, Xinan is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow, a 2024 NYSCA grant recipient, an LMCC Arts Center resident (2022), and an Ox-Bow Summer Fellow (2016). She has collaborated on public projects with the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology (Cambridge, MA), Stone Quarry Art Park (Syracuse, NY), and Beam Center (Governors Island, NY). Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator, and an aspiring set designer for new theaters. www.xinanran.work

CREATIVE CREDITS

Stage Manager Randi Rivera
Lighting Designer Amanda Ringger

Rumen
Choreographed by Ivy Baldwin
Performances: Ivy Baldwin, Anna Adams Stark, Saúl Ulerio and Darrin Wright
Music Composition: Justin Jones
Musician and Songwriter: Ryan Tracy
Visual Design by Ivy Baldwin in collaboration with Inna Babaeva

Body Goes
Choreography and Direction by Jeanine Durning
Made with Molly Poerstel
Performed by Jeanine Durning and Molly Poerstel
Lighting by Mandy Ringger
Design Consultants: Xenoduo