Jody Oberfelder

A single person with an old suitcase on a bridge. What is she doing there? Is she on a trip? Homeless? She dances with the suitcase and also underlines everyday accomplishments with her actions. She's in motion, she starts up conversations, sometimes touching takes place. Do we walk past, do we observe, or do we participate? Jody Oberfelder extends an invitation to us. This artist has been working as a choreographer in New York City since the 1970s, and she searches for the connections between dance and everyday life, she celebrates the presence of the moment and savors it. "Let's travel together," she says about her site-specific project Life Traveler, which was created in 2018 and has been performed on many bridges around the globe since then. She has reworked this choreographic pop-up with international performers for DANCE 2023 and municipal spaces in Munich.

The artistic portfolio of the American choreographer and filmmaker Jody Oberfelder is huge. She directs operas, she choreographs fashion models for the photographer Steven Meisel, and she produced Kurt Weill's Zaubernacht at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York (2018). This was Weill's first composition for the stage, a ballet pantomime for children that he wrote in 1922 and was considered lost for a long time. Oberfelder has directed ten films, and she toured across the globe with her company Jody Oberfelder Projects (JOP), which she founded in 1987. As a dancer, she is influenced by post-modern dance, and she performed in pieces by Steve Paxton (2012) and Simone Forti (2018/2019) in the context of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Although she is the generation emerging just after the revolutionary movement that came together at Judson Dance Theater, she is very familiar with their concepts and ideas, and Jody Oberfelder has searched for her very own method of thinking and practicing dance, choreography, and movement in a new manner. It is important to her to allow the audience to become participants. The unexpected should develop, immersive moments should become possible, and intimate encounters and mutual exchanges. In her notes on Life Traveler, she writes: "Note to self: don't make the piece only for/about the audience member, but also your own experience of presence, of being connected deeply to the person/people, time, place."

Ready for a small "dance encounter”? Eight dancers will simultaneously be on the move in the inner city of Munich.

In addition, at DANCE 2023 Jody Oberfelder will celebrate the world premiere of her performative tour Walking to Present.