In tandem with performance, jill sigman/thinkdance creates game structures that allow performance and artmaking to spill over the bounds of the theater. Through secret message campaigns, cell phone games, and the jill sigman/thinkdance Audio Peephole, people in many places can become part of the web of the work.
Some jill sigman/thinkdance Games:
Secret Message Campaigns
In fall 2004, Sigman wrote texts about why she creates experimental dance and left 200 of them around New York City. She attached them to telephone poles and fire hydrants, left them in taxi-cabs and on subway cars, put them in the frozen food case in the supermarket, and thumbtacked them to trees in Riverside Park. This first secret message campaign asked people to think about the value of art and blurred the boundaries between real life and performance.
Sigman continued to create subsequent rounds of secret messages. In conjunction with Pulling the Wool: An American Landscape of Truth and Deception (2004), she hid small cards with the text of the Gettysburg Address in stores throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. After the 2004 Presidential election, she left eggshells with handwritten messages of hope on subway seats, phone booths, ATMs, and in bicycle baskets. In Berlin, in connection with a performance installation at TAKT Kunstprojektraum, she posted trails of messages on the streets leading to the gallery.
OPERATION: EGGSHELL
OPERATION: EGGSHELL was an extension of the dance RUPTURE. RUPTURE was performed inside a large ring of eggshell rubble. Written on the broken eggshells were anonymous answers to the following 3 questions:
1) What have you broken?
2) What have you lost?
3) How do you want to die?
Answers to these questions were gathered through a secret message campaign called OPERATION: EGGSHELL. Close to 10,000 tiny cards with the 3 questions on them were planted in supermarket freezers, books in bookstores, clothing store dressing rooms, bicycle baskets, vending machines, on subways and buses, in ATMs and phone booths, tacked to trees, and left in restaurants, theaters, public bathrooms, and department stores. Cards were disseminated in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, LA, and other cities in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, upstate New York, Arizona, Texas, Ohio, Florida, Vermont, and Virginia. Cards were carried to many other countries including Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Serbia, India, Mexico, and Palestine. People who found the cards were able to respond to the questions by email. Their answers were then hand written onto the eggshells in New York City. Those eggshells formed the ring in which RUPTURE was performed.
Why We Do
An improvisation/game structure created for the
campus at Florida State University, Why We Do
involved 3 performers improvising for 3 hours on adjacent
outdoor sites. The sites were identified by messages on lawn
spikes and signs with a telephone number. Via cell phone,
viewers received instruction to look for things in the
landscape and leave answers to related questions on the
voicemail while watching the performance.
The jill sigman/thinkdance
Audio Peephole
The Audio Peephole allows people to witness some part of
Sigman’s ongoing choreographic process through sound.
Recordings change on a regular basis. To visit the Audio
Peephole, email jill sigman/thinkdance for
the secret number.
thinkdance@attglobal.net