The Invitation Situation

2025 Guggenheim fellow and Alpert award-winning choreographer Jeanine Durning comes together with a group of stellar women dance artists and thinkers for the making of The Invitation Situation, a choreo-performance experiment based on Durning’s signature movement practice, nonstopping. Following a basic desire to “practice together,” Jeanine was invited by Andee Scott, Mary Williford-Shade, Heidi Brewer, and Clare Croft in the midst of the 2021 pandemic lock downs to share her practice over Zoom which then soon developed into a desire to create a performance together. Building on the initial invitation, as well as the situation of being in 3 different states and 2 countries, The Invitation Situation highlights the labor and intelligence of the dancer’s enduring desire to move and build something together. Teetering at the edge of what could be in an ever-shifting environment, this choreography exposes both the precision and precarity of the dancer’s decision-making from moment to moment, somewhere between personal agency and collective will – grappling with time, place, and makeshift meanings.