Our work is an intersection of embodied design, physicality, visual space, and directional sound. We approach the creation and presentation of our work with a belief that dance is a visual art form and visual art is a physical form. The reframing of these forms is the basis of all our work and can be seen in how we create a synergistic “third space” where the design, physical movement, set, and sound combine to create something unique and singular to their combination. The choreography is not fully realized without the containment and shaping of these physical elements. This is seen in A Crack in Everything (2011), where dancers performed with red string extending from their mouths, causing them to change their physicality as they try to do the choreography while attached to the taut string. This device framed, exaggerated, and thwarted the dancers’ physicality, creating a new dance that cannot exist without the specific interaction of these physical elements.

Cross-disciplinary research is another way we access this “third space.” Often we use photography and painting to locate and distill the nexus of an idea before it becomes movement. In the development of BeginAgain (2014) We created large paper casts of the dancers’ body that informed the movement and set, allowing the ephemera of choreography to linger in space as a tangible artifact. For Clear & Sweet (2016), we used video editing to manipulate the material we made in rehearsal through cutting, reverse, and slow motion, and then we brought it back to the studio to adapt it into live performance. Considering the movement as though we were seeing a sculpture, film, or painting allows us to expand the medium of classical ballet vocabulary and how it functions in performance.

While our work is not recognized as ballet, the genesis of the choreography is strongly rooted in formalized technique. The rigor and articulateness as understood through the dancer body allows us to access and express a physicality of the most raw human experiences. In BeginAgain we worked to convey a particularly nuanced expression with soloist Ariel Freedman, creating movement that deviated wildly from classical form while still honoring and engaging the technique. In nous/us (2015) we juxtaposed classical ballet timing and form with vocabulary from J-Setting, a style practiced by university dance teams. This is at the heart of what distinguishes my choreography: we use ballet in relationship to other elements and techniques, transforming it into something entirely new and expansive in its expressive capacity.

Our works are responsive to the play between each of the elements and the audience. Often zoe | juniper works exist both as a proscenium performance and installation, which allows play with duration, proximity, and shifting visual worlds in unique ways, offering multiple routes into the work. Limitations are often a major source of inspiration. In No One to Witness Study #4 (2012), space limitations led us to invite audiences to lay on the floor, erasing separation between the art and the viewer that created a profoundly intimate experience. In this way, reconfiguring pieces for each venue keeps the work alive. Our process has evolved from recreating an exacting initial vision into nurturing creative exploration where mistakes and disruption reveal new, exciting avenues. The malleability built into the work fosters a continual play and deeper creativity, allowing me to make work in a perpetual process of becoming rather than from a fixed place and mindset. Through constant reframing and reinvention we access this liminal state that can only happen at this moment in time and space through the convergence of each element. Our art is a glimpse into this place of fleeting magic. 

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.

DESIGNERS

Evan Christian Anderson

COmposer, clear & Sweet, Lighting Design Associate Clear & Sweet, Begin Again, Lighting Design, When we were kings

Julian MartleW

Sound Design
BeginAgain, Clear & Sweet
 

Amiya grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she studied Ballet and Modern dance at the Santa Fe Dance Foundation.  She received her BA in Drama with a minor in Dance from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas.  At UIW she pursued acting, dancing, painting, and lighting design.  After college, she worked as a performer and lighting designer. In 2010, she received her MFA in Theatrical Lighting Design at the University of Washington. She now works as the Resident Lighting Designer at Velocity Dance Center, as well as a freelance lighting designer and visual artist. Her work includes collaborations with choreographers, theatre companies, visual artist and musicians.  Some notable collaborators include Pat Graney, AmyO/Tiny Rage, Amelia Reeber, Aiko Kinoshita, Umami, Cornerstone Theatre Company, Book-it Repertory Theatre, Austin Shakespeare, and Washington Ensemble Theatre.

Evan Anderson is a lighting designer for theatre and dance and a musician.  In and around Seattle he has worked with ACT Theatre, On The Boards, Book-It Repertory Theatre, Seattle Public Theatre, the UW School of Drama, Washington Ensemble Theatre, Velocity Dance Center, among others.  He is a company member of CabinFever and he currently resides on Bainbridge Island.  He is a graduate of the University of Washington.  

Julian Martlew is a musician, composer, audio technician and radio announcer in Seattle. 

Recent projects include:

Audio - mixing a live radio broadcast of Sub Pop artists Mudhoney from the roof of the Space Needle at Seattle Center. 

Composition - music based on Tarot cards for choreographer Catherine Cabeen's work Fire, commissioned by On the Boards.

Live Performance - slide guitar for choreographer Paige Barnes work Naked. 

Voice - imaging and underwriting for KEXP FM 90.3 Seattle.  

Greg Haines

  Composer
A Crack in everything

 Morgan Henderson

Composer
A Crack in everything,
The Devil You Know...,
Kate & Zoe, There ain't no easy way out, beginagain

Christine Meyers

Costumes
BEgin again, Clear & Sweet

Greg Haines is an English musician and composer who has been living in Berlin since 2008. He was born in a small town in the south of England in the 1980s, where he began from a young age to develop an interest in sound and the devices used to create it.
Since 2008, he has also been working regularly as a composer for dance, creating music for choreographers such as Meg Stuart (Berlin), Ina Christel Johannessen (Oslo), and the MD Collective (Cologne). In February 2012, Greg premiered a new work with contemporary Ballet choreographer David Dawson, the Holland Symfonia and the Dutch National Ballet as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations. Roslyn Sulcas for The New York Times wrote:
 “The work is dark, both literally and metaphorically, but also exquisitely, wrenchingly, beautiful; a world of its own that draws you ineluctably within.”

 Morgan Henderson is the former bassist of the post-hardcore band The Blood Brothers and the indie rock band Sharks Keep Moving, the current bassist in the post-punk band Past Lives, and a multi-instrumentalist with Seattle-based folk-pop group Fleet Foxes and Seattle based folk group The Cave Singers. Henderson has also been credited for playing a range of keyed instruments, including piano, accordion, and a Nord II synthesizer. As with the other former members of The Blood Brothers, he grew up in the eastside suburbs of Seattle, attending high school with his bandmates in the late 1990s when the band originally formed.

Christine Meyers is a Costume, Set and Production Designer and Cinematographer who creates for opera, theatre, dance and film across the United States and Europe. You can see her work at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's The Tempest and the upcoming indie film The Bhakti Boy.  Past productions include Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme at the Cornish Playhouse, Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Circle Mirror Transformation, This and Speech and Debate; and the earlier Peter Pan, The Highest Tide, and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears at Book-it Repertory Theatre, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar at Seattle Shakespeare Company, as well as The Imaginary Invalid at Portland Center for the Performing Arts. Film credits include the 48hour film short Lethal Cotillion (2008 Cannes Film Festival), and the indie short Medicine Wheel.  She created dissolving dresses and special effects for Alice in Chains’ 2009 video Lesson Learned.  Her work with HandelFestival in Gottingen, Germany, included draping on Orlando, which was brought to Drottningholm Palace, Sweden.  

Performers

TROY OGILVIE

PERFORMER
CLEAR & SWEET

Troy Ogilvie has danced for and collaborated with choreographers Andrea Miller (Gallim Dance), Sidra Bell, Gabriel Forestieri, Idan Sharabi, Itzik Galili, Shannon Gillen, Margie Gillis, Austin McCormick, Patricia Noworol, and Harumi Terayama; theatre company Punchdrunk; director Peter Sellers; and The Metropolitan Opera. Most recently, she performed as Lady Macbeth in Punchdrunk's Sleep No More (2013-2015). Troy has been working as a solo artist since 2008, performing solos by Sidra Bell, Itzik Galili, Margie Gillis (as a member of The Legacy Project/Le Projet Heritage), Shannon Gillen, Austin McCormick, Andrea Miller, Idan Sharabi and Harumi Terayama. Additionally, Troy is a founding collaborator and faculty member of the Movement Invention Project (Artistic Director Alexandra Wells) and Assistant to the Artistic Director of Springboard Danse Montreal. She is also one of Dance Magazine's 2011 25 to Watch and a BFA recipient form The Juilliard School. 

DOMINIC SANTIA

PERFORMER
CLEAR & SWEET

Originally from Michigan, USA, Dominic received his B.F.A from The Juilliard School in 2006. After his studies he joined La La La Human Steps (2006-09) under the direction of Edouard Lock for the production "Amjad". He then spent some time as a guest with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal before joining Nederlands Dans Theater in December of 2009. At NDT he had the opportunity to work with Crystal Pite, Johan Inger, Jiri Kylian, Sol Leo and Paul Lightfoot as well as several other choreographers. Following his time at NDT, he joined Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, and toured internationally as a member of their company L-E-V, and is now working as a freelance artist. 

KIM LUSK

REHEARSAL DIRECTOR
CHOREOGRAPHIC ASSISTANT
eleven, beginagain Clear & sweet,
we are kings, we were.

Kim Lusk has worked with zoe | juniper since 2012 as a performer, rehearsal director and currently as Rehearsal + Choreographic Assistant. She is a choreographer based in Seattle, and her work has been presented by Velocity Dance Center, Bumbershoot, and the Seattle International Dance Festival. She has also performed with Peggy Piacenza, Corrie Befort and Britta Joy Peterson.
She holds a degree in dance from Connecticut college. 

PAST COLLABORATORS

Robert Aguilar - Lighting Design ( A Crack in Everything)
Evan Anderson - Assistant Lighting Director (Begin Again Tour)
Erik Andor - Costume Design (A Crack in Everything, Kate & Zoe)
Celeste Cooning - Scenic Design (BeginAgain)
Kamran Sadeghi - Sound Design (The devil you know...)
Matt Starritt - Sound Design (A Crack in Everything)
Jessica Trundy - Lighting Design