
zoe | juniper: the other shore
General admission tickets from $10–$20. See details below.
The creations of zoe | juniper dissolve barriers and challenge expectations with a combination of bodies, light, sound, and sculpture.
the other shore is a thought-provoking, two-room installation that interrogates the audience-performer relationship and offers new perspectives on how we interact with stories. Both rooms are choreographed so each audience member has a unique perspective, allowing them to co-choreograph their experience.
In Room 1, Always Now, audience members enter the space and lie on the floor. Local and international dancers perform over and around them, creating shifting, intimate relationships between each audience member and each performer.
Room 2, Future Ancestors, is an immersive sculptural installation and a durational dance performance. Here, in contrast to Room 1, audience members are invited to move around the room as soloists examine their birth stories within the physical container of the layered, explosive sculpture.
“More than most contemporary dance, each of their full-length works seems like a fully realized world with its own laws, personalities, and forces of nature.”
The Stranger
TICKETS
Tickets available for $20. $10 UNC-Chapel Hill student tickets available with valid UNC One Card. Additional discounts available. Visit our FAQ page for details.
EVENT DETAILS
- Runtime: 90 minutes (total)
- Content warning: Loud music and some flashing lights
- Additional information: Visit our FAQ page
CREDITS
Concept and Direction by Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey
- Concept & Direction, Performance Direction: Zoe Scofield
- Concept & Direction: Juniper Shuey
- Choreography: Zoe Scofield with the dancers
- Producer: Lilach Orenstein
- Scenic Design: Sara Brown
- Sound Design: Bobby McElver
- Music Composition: Evan Christian Anderson
- Lighting Design: Evan Christian Anderson
- Lighting Director: Jacob Zedek
- Dramaturgy: Meredith Glisson
- Costume Consultant: Stephanie Bahniuk
- Video Design: Juniper Shuey
- Performers: Zoe Scofield, Kehari Hutchinson, Nia-Amina Minor, Justin Rapaport, Gia Falzone, Akoiya Harris, Katerina Belmatch, CJ
- Rehearsal Director: Shane Donohue
the other shore was co-commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts.
ABOUT zoe | juniper
zoe | juniper creations exist at the intersection of dance, installation, and video technology. They dissolve barriers between art, artist, and audience by challenging expectations of perception and making space for empathy and connection. Collaborating with artists from diverse fields, they employ a specific, singular combination of bodies, light, sound, and sculpture to realize each project. When teaching their approach parallels their process: it is collaborative, experimental, and rigorous. Their process nurtures play, a creative exploration where disruptions reveal new, exciting avenues. Rather than targeting a specific product, their work exists in a perpetual state of becoming. Through constant reframing and reinvention, they access a realm of liminality specific to the convergence of each element in a moment. Their art is a glimpse into this place of fleeting magic.
MORE ABOUT ZOE | JUNIPER
Their work is an intersection of embodied design, physicality, visual space, and directional sound. They approach the creation and presentation of their work with a belief that dance is a visual art form and visual art is a physical form. The reframing of these forms is the basis of all their work and can be seen in how they create a synergistic “third space” where the design, physical movement, set, and sound combine to create something unique and singular to their combination. The choreography is not fully realized without the containment and shaping of these physical elements. This is seen in A Crack in Everything (2011), where dancers performed with red string extending from their mouths, causing them to change their physicality as they tried to do the choreography while attached to the taut string. This device framed, exaggerated, and thwarted the dancers’ physicality, creating a new dance that could not exist without the specific interaction of these physical elements.
Cross-disciplinary research is another way they access this “third space.” Often they use photography and painting to locate and distill the nexus of an idea before it becomes movement. In the development of BeginAgain (2014) they created large paper casts of the dancer’s body that informed the movement and set, allowing the ephemera of choreography to linger in space as a tangible artifact. For Clear & Sweet (2016), they used video editing to manipulate the material they made in rehearsal through cutting, reverse, and slow motion, and then they brought it back to the studio to adapt it into live performance. Considering the movement as though they were seeing a sculpture, film, or painting allowed them to expand the medium of classical ballet vocabulary and how it functioned in performance.
While their work is not recognized as ballet, the genesis of the choreography is strongly rooted in formalized technique. The rigor and articulateness as understood through the dancer body allows them to access and express a physicality of the most raw human experiences. In BeginAgain they worked to convey a particularly nuanced expression with soloist Ariel Freedman, creating movement that deviated wildly from classical form while still honoring and engaging the technique. In nous/us (2015) they juxtaposed classical ballet timing and form with vocabulary from J-Setting, a style practiced by university dance teams. This is at the heart of what distinguishes their choreography: they use ballet in relationship to other elements and techniques, transforming it into something entirely new and expansive in its expressive capacity.
Their works are responsive to the play between each of the elements and the audience. Often zoe | juniper works exist both as a proscenium performance and an installation, which allows play with duration, proximity, and shifting visual worlds in unique ways, offering multiple routes into the work. Limitations are often a major source of inspiration. In No One to Witness Study #4 (2012), space limitations led them to invite audiences to lie on the floor, erasing separation between the art and the viewer to create a profoundly intimate experience. In this way, reconfiguring pieces for each venue keeps the work alive. The zoe | juniper process has evolved from recreating an exacting initial vision into nurturing creative exploration where mistakes and disruption reveal new, exciting avenues. The malleability built into the work fosters a continual play and deeper creativity, allowing them to make work in a perpetual process of becoming rather than from a fixed place and mindset. Through constant reframing and reinvention they access this liminal state that can only happen at this moment in time and space through the convergence of each element. Their art is a glimpse into this place of fleeting magic.