Jil Guyon is an award-winning visual and performing artist who works between movement-based performance, visual art, and digital media. Her work has been presented at theaters, cinemas, museums, galleries and concert halls world-wide, including: Lincoln Center’s Dance on Camera Festival, Cinedanse Quebec, Fashion Art Toronto, Women and Fashion FilmFEST (Best Experimental Film) at Symphony Space, NYC, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, and NOW New Music Festival, among others. As part of the Toronto Urban Film Festival curated by Guy Maddin, her performance-video, Widow, was seen throughout the Toronto mass transit system, averaging over 2 million riders/viewers per day. She has also performed alongside Kiki Smith and Alvin Curran in Joan Jonas’s Variations on a Scene at The Wave Hill Dancescape in Riverdale, NY, and as a guest artist in Noemie Lafrance’s Agora II at the McCarren Park pool in Brooklyn. Guyon’s critically acclaimed multimedia theater piece, At the Borders of Eternity, based on The Diary of Anne Frank, starred celebrated German actress Elfriede Irrall and was featured on ORF television (Austria). It is currently part of the collection of the Kulturarchiv in Vienna and was the first theatrical work granted exclusive use of the diary. Jil Guyon is a Lumiere prize (Canada) nominee, and a recipient of the IndieFEST, Global Shorts and Accolade Awards for Excellence in experimental film, as well the Magistrat der Stadt Wien Award (Austria), and a Harriet E. Eagleston Fellowship. She lives and works in Newark, NJ.
Widow’s End and Coda (films)
Two films by Jil Guyonwill be presented. Set against the backdrop of a volcanic red rock quarry in southern Iceland, Widow’s End depicts a lone woman caught in an extreme, inhospitable landscape. Enveloped in a swath of black fabric, her inner and outer realities collide—eliciting a visual tableau that is both beautiful and horrific in its invocation of loss. Shot as one take, Coda features a woman lying motionless on red, volcanic gravel as a handheld camera scans her body. The generating event of her predicament occurred before the film time—inviting spectators to free-associate about the mystery of her plight, and the inevitability of one’s own temporality.
“My creative history with New Dance Alliance goes a way long. Since my friend, Chivas Sandage brought me to New Dance Alliance to rehearse in early 90’s, the place has become a part of my creative life. The long time existence of the studio and Performance Mix Festival are vital to the artists who seek and explore deep into their process. Whenever I step into the studio, it’s a new space with a lot of memories. I lie down on the floor, listen to my body, and I dance. It is valuable. The time in the space nurtures my practice and artistic vision. Karen’s vision of Lift-Off residency, feedback sessions, providing peer to peer connections are more significant than ever. It has been helping us to get through 2020 and we are going into 2021.”
– Nami Yamamoto
New Dance Alliance
182 Duane Street
New York, NY 10013
All venues are wheelchair accessible.
