Laurel Jenkins

My choreography emerges from rigorous experimentation and interdisciplinary dialogues in the realms of contemporary dance, opera, music, theater, and visual art. I engage with the choreographic process as a radical space for reimagining our collective human experience. I experience dancing body as an imagining body. I am captivated by shifts of weight, the spiral of a bone, an exhale. The dancer has embodied knowledge that is specifically relevant to this historical moment where adaptation and transformation are necessary for our survival and evolution. When I make dances, I center on the raw human body in action as the main agent of transmogrification. I am interested in slippage: how forms subtly slip and generate a multiplicity of meanings. As I make performances, I am interested in writing new mythologies that utilize dance as a methodology for shapeshifting the present and future.

In 2017, a new version of Leonard Bernstein's MASS was coproduced by the LA Phil and Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. The piece was directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer and choreographed by Laurel Jenkins. Photo by Richard Termine.

Laurel Jenkins’ choreography emerges from rigorous experimentation and interdisciplinary dialogues in the realms of contemporary dance, opera, music, theater, and visual art. She engages with the choreographic process as a radical space for reimagining our collective human experience. Her work has been presented by Lincoln Center, Disney Hall, REDCAT, Automata, the Getty Center, Show Box LA, Danspace, Berlin’s Performing Presence Festival, and Tokyo’s Sezane Gallery. She choreographed Bernstein’s MASS with the LA Phil and the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. In addition, she has choreographed for LA Contemporary Dance Company, The Wooden Floor, California State University, Long Beach, University of Vermont, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Jenkins was a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company from 2007-2012, and developed original roles in Brown’s final works. Jenkins also danced in New York with Vicky Shick and Sara Rudner. She performed the role of Ismene in Peter Sellars’ staging of Oedipus Rex conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. She performed solos by Merce Cunningham in Los Angeles as a part of the Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event. Jenkins is the recipient of a Vermont Arts Council Grant, an Asian Cultural Council Grant, a French Institute Residency, holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence, and an MFA from UCLA. She is a certified in the Skinner Releasing Technique and is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at Middlebury College in Vermont.