Artist, Academic, Wayfarer
Jes Wittig is a NYC-based dance artist and academic. Jes' choreographic work investigates themes including folklore and mythology, high camp and low kitsch, and blurring boundaries between character and self. Her 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 the Arts On Site Residency Center in upstate New York and at the Dragon's Egg in Connecticut. Jes has had the pleasure of performing the works of Lar Lubovitch, Alexandra Beller, Hamid Rahmanian, Africa Guzmán, Seán Curran, Bill Young, Lucinda Childs, and Robin Becker, among others. Jes has performed at NYC venues including the American Airlines Theatre, Arts On Site, Symphony Space, and Dixon Place, and on the National Mall in Washington DC. She holds a B.A. in Dance from Hofstra University, an M.A. in Religion from Columbia University, ¾ of an M.F.A. in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College, and a cup of loose tuna.
Jes’ scholarly and poetry works have been presented and published by Carnegie Mellon, Vancouver School of Theology, Sarah Lawrence Literary Review, Venefica Magazine, and Public Pressure Magazine. Her poem “Idioms of Kinship” will appear in Princeton University’s inaugural edition of Melange in 2026, and her essay “Gazing Into the Palantír: Limitless Serial Longevity in Tolkien and Transhumanism” will appear in the edited volume Theology, Religion, and Middle-Earth in 2027. Her research spans topics including time, technology, embodiment, and the imaginal realm. Prior to engaging her disciplines within academia as her primary work, she supplemented her freelance work as a Kripalu yoga teacher, reiki master, and tarotmancer. She is currently adjunct faculty of Religious Studies at Iona University and guest faculty of Dance at Sarah Lawrence College. Her favorite animal is the octopus.
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.
