SciArt Magazine - All Issues February 2016 | Page 20

STRAIGHT TALK

with Jody Oberfelder

Jody Oberfelder is a New–York based
modern dancer that brings dance to the next
level through the use of film, incorporation of
detailed sets, and interaction with her audience
members. As the artistic director of Jody
Oberfelder Projects, Oberfelder has created
works seen all over the world from the United
States to Korea, France, and Serbia, and has been
a teaching artist at the Lincoln Center Institute
for the past 15 years. Oberfelder’s work is
supported by numerous foundations and
organizations including the Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council, the Department of Cultural
Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts,
the New York Foundation for the Arts,
and others.

By Danielle McCloskey
Contributor
DM: Tell us about yourself and Jody Oberfelder Projects.
JO: What a simple question, and yet I really have to
think about this answer… I was the kind of child who
couldn’t sit still, had a rambunctious tomboy energy, and
liked to perform, making up little dances in my living
room, and acting out stories in the vacant lot next to
our home in Detroit, Michigan. We pretended to be
horses, and created jumps out of sticks, nuzzled, etc. It
was very real and physical. I went to college for liberal
arts and majored in art history and philosophy before
walking into a dance class. That was it. A dancer with
Alwin Nikolais—Emery Hermanns—came to our college
and taught improvisation and composition. More than
learning someone else’s movement, I loved to improvise,
make things up. This was the beginning.
It takes a while to find your voice, and to not be imitative of the techniques ‘of the moment’. There is the
scribble and doodle technique of creating—just get in a
room and move and hopefully you’ll be brilliant—or the
more focused creation behind the moves. My methodology shifts for each piece.
I find dancers who have the right ‘colors’ for each
piece. Think of a palette. You need the right mix. It’s
incredible how dancer–specific each creation is. After all,
you are making live art with people in the room. I look
for dancers with body intelligence. I don’t want ‘off the

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Jody Oberfelder portrait by Vivian Selbo.

rack’ dancers, but rather those who glow from the inside
out with sensorial instinctual connections. This inner
body encased by skin becomes artfully porous and is
readable, thus communicating outwardly with an audience. I don’t believe in an us/them performer to audience relationship. Here’s my manifesto:
I want the audience to experience dance as a language
that goes directly into the brain, like smell, activated
by visual, physical, and motional cues—mirror neurons
connecting, reflecting striations of performing human
brains, bodies, and souls.
I want the audience to be entertained by their own
biology—their own moving minds—as they perceive,
intellectually and sensorially, time, color, movement, and
sound.
I want the audience to experience dancers as dimensional—to mark and empathize with choreographic data,
as touching places in their own selves, minds, and hearts.
The ephemerality of life—finite and infinite—experienced in the theater should be a model of the ‘theater’ in
each audience member’s own mind, the dance of neurons going on all the time amid the ever shifting presence of informational flow.
I want the audience to experience and gain insight

SciArt in America February 2016