Mission

zoe | juniper creations exist at the intersection of dance, installation and video technology. We dissolve barriers between art, artist and audience by challenging expectations of perception and making space for empathy and connection. Collaborating with artists from diverse fields, we employ a specific, singular combination of bodies, light, sound and sculpture to realize each project. When teaching our approach parallels our process: it is collaborative, experimental and rigorous. Our process nurtures play, a creative exploration where disruptions reveal new, exciting avenues. Rather than targeting a specific product, our work exists in a perpetual state of becoming. Through constant reframing and reinvention, we access a realm of liminality specific to the convergence of each element in a moment. Our art is a glimpse into this place of fleeting magic. 

Diversity

Dance offers us new ways to imagine ourselves, the world around us and the world we want to live in. By excluding others we are destroying many  rich possibilities, essentially, we deny life. Dance must do a better job including people who do not fall within the narrow boundaries of what dance has historically looked like.  zoe | juniper is addressing how we can actively create space for and recruit more physically diverse members  in our company. The dance field, including zoe | juniper   needs to continue to address individuals with disabilities, non-visible disabilities, the need for accessibility, neurodiversity, and neurodivergence in the dance field. For too long, the dance world has been shaped by ableist, Eurocentric, ageist, non-disabled ideas about whose body can dance and what dance should look like. These prejudices have caused great harm to the dance world and countless artists with much to offer. Who are we excluding based on outdated models of who can dance and what dance looks like?

It is time to promote practice  and unison in non-uniform, non-homogenized bodies. zoe | juniper  aspires to enable people working, moving, and breathing towards a common desire. How can we reimagine Eurocentric-based practices without replicating toxic pedagogies, body mechanics, and hierarchies? How do we dancers deal with the space between being trained in a form that demands an unachievable perfection and our attempts to meet these demands? We reject the homogeneity we were trained to believe was the process for creating unison bodies. Our practice and classes choose patience, consistency, effortlessness, play, curiosity, joy, rigor, clarity, and compassion, all of which are necessary for growth and true artistic freedom and creativity.

zoe | juniper has access to, relationships and skills within the arts community; we seek to facilitate conversation and action on resource sharing, mental health support for artists, equity, diversity, undoing unconscious bias for artists, which we hope, will filter into the various communities they participate in. 

History

2015 Guggenheim Fellow and 2013 Stranger Genius award winner zoe | juniper (zj) is a Seattlebased dance and visual arts team The Boston Globe describes as a “crazy dream you just can’t shake.” Cofounded by choreographer Zoe Scofield and visual artist Juniper Shuey, the company creates stunning multidisciplinary dance performance and installation works. Over the past 13 years zj has been commissioned and presented nationally and internationally by Jacob’s Pillow, On the Boards, Dance Theater Workshop/NYLA, Bates Dance Festival, PICA, DiverseWorks, PS122, Spoleto Festival, Columbia College, PuSh Festival, Wesleyan University, American Realness, Pennsylvania Ballet, ICA Boston, Joyce Theater, DancePlace, Frye Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center, Trafo House, REDCAT, OzArts, SIFFx, Carolina Performing Arts, Fringe Arts Festival, CNDC Anger and others. Awards and residencies include The MacDowell Colony, Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation, Princess Grace Foundation, Mellon Foundation and MAPFund.