Venezuela RPCV Jane Comfort is one of the most original choreographers in the downtown scene.
"Jane Comfort is one of the most original choreographers
in the downtown scene."
The Village Voice
Jane Comfort and Company is a dance-theater group whose work pushes the limits of dance and drama to achieve a new form of theater. Movement often serves as metaphor for text, at times subverting its meaning and always revealing the heart of a story. An instigator of collaborations across various artistic disciplines, Comfort's subject material is as diverse as the artists and art forms she employs. What remains constant is her ability to integrate seemingly disparate elements to deliver work that is gripping, inspirational, and unforgettable. The company is currently offering two touring programs: the evening-length, urban dance-opera Asphalt, and the repertory works Persephone and the BESSIE award-winning Underground River in a shared evening.
Comfort’s interdisciplinary work has been hailed by Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times as “one of the most fertile minds in the theater of mixed forms.” And by Elizabeth Zimmer of The Village Voice as “one of the most original choreographers on the downtown scene.”
Asphalt illuminates the life of a homeless DJ who was abandoned as a child, remembers nothing of his past, and uses jazz, classical, and ambient beats to transcend his urban reality to enter a world made right by music. After spinning music at a rave, he meets a woman who leads him into a world where the spirits of his past come forth to show him the layers of his familial history. Asphalt has toured throughout the US, including a return engagement to the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, and performances in New York City in January 2002 as part of The Joyce Theater’s Altogether Different series.
Jane Comfort and Company will tour Persephone and the 2000 BESSIE award-wining Underground River in a shared evening in the 2004-2005 season. Based on the classical Greek myth, Persephone is performed within a set of bamboo, metal, and neon by internationally recognized sculptor Keith Sonnier, with a score by Tigger Benford based on Javanese gamelan musical structures. Persephone's beauty is so admired by Hades that he abducts her, forcing her to live with him as Queen of the Underworld. Griefstricken, Persephone's mother, Demeter, causes all nature on earth to die until she wins Persephone's release from the underworld each year for four months -- thus, Spring. Persephone's natural world is one of white flooring and a white cyc upon which slide projections of painted 35 millimeter film will be cast. In the chaos following her abduction, this world is torn away to reveal an underworld of metal, neon, ripped earth, and darkness. The white marley flooring is dragged back to reveal another black marley underneath. Light sculptures descend into the space, changing the stage environment to one of neon, darkness, and shadows-the underworld, and the realm of the psyche.
Underground River is Comfort's meditation on the dichotomy of the artistic life: an artist's inner creative world and the external reality. This poignant work explores the rich, inner life of a girl who appears to the outer world to be unconscious, or comatose.
“Words, music, and movement seethe together; united, their rhythms whirl the morsels of meaning into life stories…(Asphalt’s) a fascinating and gripping work.”
