Artist, Academic, Wayfarer
Jes Wittig is a NYC-based artist and academic. Jes has had the pleasure of performing the works of Lar Lubovitch, Alexandra Beller, Hamid Rahmanian, Africa Guzmán, Adam Barruch, Seán Curran, Bill Young, Lucinda Childs, and Robin Becker, among others. Jes has performed at the American Airlines Theatre, Kraine Theatre, Green Space, Arts On Site, Shapeshifter Lab, the Baumann, and Dixon Place, and the National Mall. Jes' choreographic work has been presented in NYC at venues including the Kraine Theatre, Davenport Theater, TADA, ShapeShifter Lab, and Green Space. She has been the artist in residence at Arts On Site Residency and Retreat Center in upstate NY, and at The Dragon's Egg in CT. She holds a BA in Dance from Hofstra University, an MA in Religion from Columbia University, and half an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College.
Her academic work has been presented and published by Carnegie Mellon, Vancouver School of Theology, Sarah Lawrence Literary Review, Venefica Magazine, and Public Pressure Magazine. Her poetry will appear in Princeton University’s inaugural edition of Melange this fall. Her areas of research span topics including time, technology, embodiment, and the imaginal realm. She is currently adjunct faculty at Iona University and guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.
When presented with the option of being a cyborg or a goddess, she would rather be an octopus than either.
Something resembling an artist statement
Choreographer and theologian Hannah Martha Cohen Banks once said my work is “the kind of dance where when you tell it you love it, it doesn’t care.”
Maybe the dances don't care if you love them, but they do care about time. Does time care about them? Sort of. Time loves Tea for the Tillerman. Time loves Meat Loaf. Time clearly hates Peter Thiel.
I am an artist that works with time: dance, theatre, puppetry, language, and modernity. My work is directly downstream from Martha Graham, Lar Lubovitch, Byung-Chul Han, and Tim Ingold. I have done my best to pick my own past in the way that religions get to pick theirs, which is a sort of time magic. My works aim to interrogate and indict, celebrate and tease, indulge and mock. Sometimes they invite the duende – if I’m lucky – and sometimes they wish they were never born. They attempt to track where our philosophies hide in the epistemic supermarket of late-stage capitalism. Do my dances lie? They try.
Our lungs are not complete without the rainforest. My works aren’t complete without the place-binding nature of time: sometimes they die when you take them out of their water.
It is my current hope that in 5 years, you will find me in Silicon Valley, recently installed as their resident octopus.
