About John
Artists Director/Bio
I grew up in a midsize city and came to dance through a circuitous route via a rebellious high school teacher and a first close friend. After the first time moving choreographically, or catching my dancing partner in our first duet together for what was then an impossible lift, I never looked back. I loved it and searched out what it could mean for my life and how to better articulate the experiencing of dance both as a performative act and an individual journey.
That need in turn brought me to NYC where I have spent most of my life. I am a city person and it was to NYC that I came for my earliest training. Inspired after seeing my first live dance performance with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater company, I traveled to NYC to take classes at the Ailey School of Dance from such legends as Pepsi Bethel. Those classes rocked with live accompaniment and like a creature who finds their natural habitat, they were a sea of inspiration and determination. In this early stage I also attended NYU’s Tisch University for the Performing Arts. Through a serendipitous route shortly thereafter I began working with other mentors and great artists active at that time such as Anna Sokolow, Paul Sanasardo, and Ernestine Stodelle. Through them I learned much about movement, choreography that added to my knowledge of the dance field; American dance in particular and its history. I left marked by my experiences from working with them, further transformed and sustained. In this early period I continued my studies in other styles and disciplines such as Graham, Humphrey-Weidman, Limon, Horton, flamenco, and throughout, ballet with such distinctive mentors as Frank Bays, formally of the Joffrey Ballet.
After this initial track I began and continue to this day in discourse with other forms of emerging dance. This includes my consequential work in contact improvisation with such talented artists as K.J. Holmes, with whom I have also had the immense pleasure to perform. My interests and pursuit within these emerging forms has had a profound impact on my movement sensibility and approach to making works. To say that my immersion in this area of the dance world has been a maturation would point in the right definitional direction.
During my career I have had the fortune to embark on daring new works such as Toxic/Nourishment where I realized a new way of constructing narrative, expressing movement within a contact improv form, and furthering the relational capacity of movement as a constant dialogue between artists and dance material. Similarly, to be able to work with such powerful works of music that composer’s like Sophia Gubaidulina and Beethoven created has had a significant impact on the style and direction of my work.
My company has played in a number of different venues such as churches and galleries, along with formal stage settings such as Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theater and the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater. And additionally through my work with the Glimmerglass Opera, I have had the wonderful occasion to make dance works that were performed live at the Glimmerglass Opera House in Cooperstown, New York, in collaboration with distinguished vocal artists and musicians.
While maintaining these pursuits I was simultaneously teaching and directing the Summer Dance Lab at Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA. and along with my life partner undertook and directed the Walla Walla Dance Festival. My tenure out west was significant, becoming a formative part of my history, rich with experiences that have impacted my life. My involvement with different communities encouraged and attunement to different cultures and perspectives for which I am deeply grateful.
Currently I am creating a new work based on the Oscar Wilde Fairy Tale, The Fisherman And His Soul. This tale is projected to be a full length theater piece with date of premiere yet to be determined. But a notable amount of making has already happened. You can find clips of the work-in-progress and current updates here! (link)
The environs of NYC and Jersey City are my home. I have been shaped as much by the events that have formed and come to identify these urban enclaves as the dance world that I inhabit here. I have found that the city streets, people, and landscape are as much my studio as the enclosed spaces that I go to explore movement when in a more formal setting. I have internalized these spaces and am inscribed by them. I am thankful to be embedded in a world filled with the most diverse communities in the country, open to its possibilities, interactions, and further connections of meaning.
Crafting stories through dance, connecting artistry with human experience.
About JPD
John’s work originated from a need to explore trauma, its origins and effects. From this animating force arose questions that have formed a body of work that moves between giving a language to what is real and difficult in our lives, to that part of ourselves that makes it capable to share in the beauty we find in our world, and the possibility to create spaces for meaningful connections to one another.
The company’s members are chosen for their skill and diversity both as artists and as people, each with their own distinct approach that folds together as part of a strong, cohesive ensemble. Artists are asked to internalize feelings and ideas that are part of the process of making works so as to participate in shaping movement that communicates outward. At times they are asked to follow their impulses as part of this process; further extending and enfolding the particular nuance of each individual artist into a whole.
The works construct environments that engage the audience,valuing them as participants as well as spectators to the events unfolding. John’s work strives to create movement that is visceral, that wells up from the stored knowledge we carry within our bodies, a knowledge built from our experiences in the world, our particular environs, the stories and meanings we hold, the dances we all contain within us.
Company Vision
It is the vision of John Passafiume Dancers to maintain a vibrant company of trained dance artists dedicated to pursuing the art form as a means of expressing all that is valuable, worthy, and mirthful in being human and of engendering emotionally rich and intellectually provocative work created by its artistic director, John Passafiume. As a performing group we look to engage audiences and offer performances and theatrical events to diverse communities both locally and abroad. An underlying impetus for this expression will be understanding the nature of trauma so as to address and confront it in its many forms. JPD endeavors to enrich communities through meaningful educational programs that convey the wonder and beauty of the art form, as well as offer programs that can also address issues affecting our welfare by fostering an environment of deeper understanding and one necessary for positive change.
Statements about Process & Making
I love to move. I love to link movement in a way that makes for a coherency of the invisible. An invisible made up of the energy generated by our involvement of being in the world.
This invisible is held within ourselves, composed of tracks laid down before we are fully able to account for them. Filaments of cognition and feeling within us are shaped by our environments and experiences across time, weaving threads of personality from which we declared our affinities and aversions, reinforced by prejudices and fixed notions below a nascent level. Projections imposed on us entwined with selves we felt so convinced about, then changed, all before we even knew how those strains would tauten in a world of moving things.
Our desires, the ones we know and those that come up surprise us in their awkwardness and claim.
- What we see in ourselves but can’t yet behold.
Thoughts and feelings that we are unable to track the perambulations of how we got to them, yet they drive us towards other connected thoughts and feelings.
But then knowing what you know now, in this instant, is weighed in the balance with feelings that spontaneously emerge, reshaping your present perspective in real time.
The in-the-moment interactions that shift you from knowing to feeling, from mirroring and reflecting, become making and creating. The absorption of thinking and physicality into feeling becomes an alchemical process: transmuting the feeling objects you hold into a language that communicates, radiating out beyond yourself so that others may join in to fulfill a conversation.
Our being in the world are the moments of dealing with our daily realities; sheathed as we are within the vulnerabilities we exist with at any moment. The total of who we are at this exact juncture/instant, including the treasures we hold, the frustrations we encounter.
I believe that all of this constitutes a preverbal language in our bodies.
An experience of ourselves and the world around us that is full and intact before thought qualifies it, or gives the totality of that experience a certain lens. This prelinguistic sensibility when tapped into can reveal, relate, and communicate how we hold our experiences and what responses we make.
I want to be in touch with this prelinguistic space. To physically realize it in its spontaneity, its kineticism, before thought frames it into parts and then edits what cannot be put into words.
As a dance artist I think that our bodies hold the intelligence of this preverbal language, an accrued feeling experience that is foundational to supporting the potential agency for expression and elaboration.
How this experience is built upon, interacts with, and is questioned within the conditions of its working environment becomes that alchemical process for finding both the concrete and what can be imagined. Or in the case of a dance artist, imaginably felt.
The interaction between our experiences, the questions we ask, and the present knowledge and ripeness of our being within a particular moment influence the shape of movement that is a choreographic opportunity for assemblage and has means to follow these impulses.
The richness of this process allows me to open a space to bring my multiple identities to bare, to change perspectives, to make something that connects with others and shares in the often fraught, painful, but also joyful being in the world that makes up living.