Jennifer Rose is an international choreographer, performer, teacher, director and former member of internationally renowned Shen Wei Dance Arts. She has performed at notable venues such as Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Festival du Cannes and The Olympic Theatre in Beijing. She creates works in collaboration with regional artists in lesser known crevices and larger metropolises of the world to produce highly theatrical and visual dance theatre to ignite cultural dialogue, give power to the unheard voice and liberate the personal experience of freedom.
Her work has been presented at the US Cultural Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, Cultural Consulate of Andalusia, Spain, Ancient Ruins of Extremadura, Spain, Congress-Legalize Dance, Los, Angeles, CA, multiple venues across Oaxaca, Mexico and various artist residencies around the world. She teaches masterclasses around the globe based on contemporary forms, theatrical expression and martial arts principals and alternatively offers workshops on Shen Wei’s Natural Body Development Technique. She believes live performance is an opportunity for both performers and audiences to insist on real time transformation, express universal agreements and transcend the art of story-telling.
Director Statement
Dance is not just an observation of the body, but an exposure of a human being in its entirety. It is an excavation of blood, inherited from the generations before us; the same way an archeologist unveils buried and dark histories from below what is visible on the earth’s surface. I am a U.S. citizen. As I move with the sounds of the women from The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices, I unveil a deep American immigrant story of history, language and knowledge choked from the female body upon assimilating into a culture for a hopeful future. This music evokes unknown faces and names of women whose songs have been hushed. Their knowledge and wild nature severed from gut to nerve and deemed irrelevant by unconscious culture; scoured clean for the modern
world. But we cannot be deaf to their whispers haunting sounds inside of our skulls. Their shadows follow us.
Traveling for performance and education, I have listened to and absorbed the presence of bold family matriarchs from Spain, Java, Mexico, Vietnam, Germany and my own family in search for origins of bloodlines. These women are the bearers of valuable oral traditions and hold stories of loss of identities and self- sacrifice. We dance to speak their narrative to you.
These forgotten women are our real doctors. The only ones who can truly make us whole and collect the dismantled pieces of ourselves; abandoned on the soil from far away continents.The women of the Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices hold root of our physical and spiritual tissue which determines how we breath and think and therefore act in the world. We must dig beneath the earth’s surface to unveil the muck of our own personal histories and unleash the inescapable truth of who and what we are made of. For our bodies are the living containers of our history. We dance to embed unknown stories into our flesh.
Experimental Film & Music Video Festival 