inging

“Five minutes in, a kind of electricity had taken hold in the room…Nothing was rehearsed. We were part of Durning’s present, the first recipients of this speech, the first witnesses to her thoughts. A bond formed; we were getting to know her…Durning was vigilant—not only about what was going on inside her but about what was taking place there in the room, with us. She was the embodiment of the present.”

Andrew Boynton, The New Yorker

Photo by Ian Douglas @ American Realness Festival

“Jeanine Durning’s inging is the cri de coeur of a dancer, choreographer and actor struggling, with every cell of her being, to smash any distinctions between those three identities while, more importantly, refuting any notions that body and mind, spirit and sensation, voice and physicality, emotion and intellect are separate.”

Camille LeFevre, Minneapolis, MN

*inging* at Sounded Bodies Festival, Zabreb

“Like a monumental jazz solo, inging is improvised but grounded. And it is willfully uninterrupted… she keeps digging. At times, she hits an obstacle, sticking on a word or idea, but she turns it into music, landing on a syllable over and over again and transforming it into pure sound, something outside language. And in this diligence, she tries to lay bare the very process of thought.”

Paul Kosidowski, Milwaukee Mag

Photo by Brian Rogers @ The Chocolate Factory Theater

“There is some invisible force permeating from Durning, an energy of generosity and urgency.”

Rennie McDougal, Culturebot

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Here’s a video of Jeanine introducing inging at American Realness, NYC, January 2013:

inging was first presented in June 2010 at the Frascati Theater WG in Amsterdam and has since been invited to theaters, studios, museums and galleries in Berlin (Ufer Studios and Creature Feature @ Basso), Amsterdam (Frascati Theatre WG and HetVeem Theatre), Leuven/BE (Museum M/Playground Festival), Wilson College/PA, Minneapolis/MN (SooVac Gallery), NYC (American Realness), Toronto/ON (hosted by Toronto Dance Theater and Ame Henderson/Public Recordings), Williams College/MA and Milwaukee/WI (Alverno Presents).

inging refers to the suffix “ing” in the English language.

“ing” is used to express actions that are still in progress, that haven’t yet ended.

inging proposes the insistent practice of unscripted nonstop languaging as performance, where speaker (performer) is in direct relation with listener (audience) at the moment of articulation.

Part spoken word performance, part reverie, part dance, part oral biography, part meditation and psychotherapy, inging is a choreography of the mind, moving in the continuous present. It tracks the velocity of thought through a proprioceptive cascade of words. Both performer and audience are in perpetual disequilibrium, confronted with the limits of language as a paradigm for communication, knowledge and understanding. The body and its gesture emerge as the inevitable bridge between thought and language.

Moving thought through speech, and speechifying thought through movement, brings the speaker and listener to the edges of intelligibility where the paradoxical body and the eclectic mind are possible.

All at once inside and out, past and present, present and future, present. Physical, metaphysical. Fantasy, memory. Body, voice. Each performance simultaneously produces, accumulates and archives itself. inging repeats itself, stutters, and multiplies itself. inging is a doing being and a being doing. inging is becoming.

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