jenny pommiss

choreographer/performer/educator

teaching philosophy:

We each come into the studio for class bearing weight, carrying our hopes and distractions on our backs and in our bodies. Ensconced in our stories, we wonder where they might intersect. Class is an invitation to lay our contents at our feet. Through breath and movement we shift and scatter them. We exchange and release them, creating new landscapes and revealing different possibilities for ourselves as movers and makers. We cultivate strength through technique, wonder through guided improvisation, and an embodied voice through devising material that resonates with what is important. We come together as a transient community to acknowledge our similarities and bask in our differences, We come together to fall, fail, and fly. We come together to find our way home. 

Classes taught for all age groups and populations: contemporary technique, solo and group composition, improvisation, contemporary partnering, videodance: choreography for the camera, repertory, ensemble building techniques for performance, yoga, conditioning

work with high school students:

perhaps it harkens back to my own humble beginnings in the high school dance studio, but i have always been drawn to teaching this age group. My goal is to facilitate the sense of embodiment, self-discovery, community and possibility that dance gave me during those years, and has continued to give me throughout my life. to dance and to embody thought and feeling as action is, in fact, a radical act, and the students who step foot into the studio, many for the first time, are celebrated for the experiments they make and the risks they take. I operate under the assumption that anyone can dance and everyone has something to offer as a mover, maker, or critical thinker. In the dance studio, between the play of language and movement, students wrestle with questions, process their place in the world, and prepare to step assuredly into it.