Periodically, we re-post from journals that we have interwoven relationships with — and this one is special. Samuel Hanson, Executive Director of loveDANCEmore opened REHEARSAL this month, and the first iteration is on his trip to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state to dear friend and incredible dance artist and writer, Jessie Young. She is currently in process with Jeanine Durning, making a solo selected for a 2026-2027 On the Boards Residency.
A new dance journal is born
Dear Reader,
From where I’m sitting, it’s just barely starting to feel autumnal. Fog has finally landed on the ground here in East Central Illinois. But I can attest that the fall semester at Dance at Illinois is in full swing. You’re reading the first paragraph of a new experiment that’s evidence of that kinetic energy. I’ve titled this publication Rehearsal. The name expresses what I hope to do as an editor — to catch ideas in writing as they spill out of the choreographic process.
We’re starting small with this website, where I hope to share a new piece roughly once a month.
To celebrate this venture, and the end of the summer, I took a trip this August to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state to visit one of our Dance at Illinois alums, my friend Jessie Young (MFA ’16). Jessie recently moved back to her hometown of Port Angeles from New York City, a home base from which she choreographed, taught, and rehearsed professionally for roughly a decade, including with two of our own esteemed faculty — Tere O’Connor and Cynthia Oliver.
Jessie and I first met as undergrads at the University of Utah. Our paths crossed again in New York, where we delighted in seeing each other perform around the city. A heavier thing Jessie and I have connected over recently is the experience of leaving New York in the midst of losing a parent. (Before coming to Illinois, I moved home to Utah to spend time with my mother, Heather, who died of cancer in 2019. Jessie left New York in a parallel journey before her father, Philip, died in 2025.) This experience of losing a parent and a home at the same time completely reordered both our lives, as it does for many people. Watching Jessie reweave her own existence in Port Angeles after losing her dad, I see the qualities that have long made her a sought-after artistic collaborator — resilience, generosity, stamina. She’s been writing compellingly about all of this on her own website.
In order to fulfill her appetite for performing and challenging ideas, Jessie has commissioned Jeanine Durning — a choreographer we both admire — to make a new solo on her over the next two years. This August I was able to watch a couple of the earliest rehearsals for this project. I wanted to see Jessie dance, but I was also curious about the labor of creating a local context for this ambitious new project.
Jessie (foreground) and Jeanine in rehearsal at the Black Diamond Hall in Port Angeles.
Jeanine’s work over the last several years has revolved around a practice she calls nonstopping. Sometimes in rehearsal this meant moving without stopping, shaking without stopping, or speaking without stopping. But as I learned by watching Jessie and Jeanine at work, there’s much more to it than a series of simple, if taxing, directions.
Jessie also took Jeanine and I to some incredible, surprising places around Port Angeles. We visited Raymond Carver’s grave, which annually becomes a nexus of poets and writers who gather there to read and celebrate his work. We hiked to waterfalls and high mountain ridge lines inside the Olympic National Park. My favorite place we visited was the mouth of the Elwha River, which was un-dammed a little more than a decade ago, after years of activism by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, creating a spiraling margin of land in water that now rapidly changes its shape from year to year. I could understand why Jessie wanted to bring the gifts of Jeanine’s work back to this landscape which had nourished her as a child.
The mouth of the Elwha River.
Below are some of the chaotic images I wrote in my diary after attending a couple of Jessie and Jeanine’s rehearsals. This is not a polished record of a new collaboration, or of Jeanine’s long-running development of nonstopping as a dance practice. Instead, it’s another kind of rehearsal for me, a way of continuing to practice writing about dance — a task so endlessly challenging!
From my personal journal:
…right now Jessie is agitating the meat off of her bones, vibrating one region of the body and another and another as she exhausts muscle groups, habitual patterns, ambitions. As Jeanine said a minute ago, “for lack of a better term, getting the yayas out.” This is hardly the first time I’ve seen this strategy for warming up, but there’s something particular about how Jessie commits to it. Now she’s shaking her lips in an image that reminds me of a Pipilotti Rist video in which the artist’s face is smashed against a pane of glass. She’s stroking her belly, strumming the big guitar of the self. Jeanine keeps changing the music, now it’s David Byrne singing, “For a long time I felt without style or grace/Wearing shoes with no socks in cold weather/I knew my heart was in the right place”…
…Jeanine says “moving,” cuts the music, and WOW! — all of a sudden Jessie is dancing in a way that looks so pleasurable. An arsenal of magic returned to her: she tosses her arms and the pendular motion catches her under the feet, lighting a fire, like the one we made last night on her mother’s porch, which I can still smell all over the sweater I wore today, which I no longer need as this room gets warmer and warmer. Fluidity taking Jessie over — so satisfying after having been deprived of it. But this new kind of nonstopping also has its own cascading demands — eek! — now she’s being electrocuted again, but from the inside out. She’s starting to attend to the room, to the empty chairs, to the ghosts who once sat in them waiting to be asked to dance…
… I don’t know why but I keep thinking about Robert Bresson [a French filmmaker] and his theories/superstitions/ideas about keeping actors from acting, and how the ultimate Bresson actor was the donkey who stars in Au hazard Balthazar — the titular character as a blank slate on which the narrative is projected. Watching Jessie, I feel like she is learning to be deprived of something, of much of what dancers hide behind — a kind of affect or dramatization of the self, or, of technique, maybe. And yet what’s being asked of her here seems so much more infinitely challenging than just “getting to the doorknob on time” as Bresson’s method was once described to me…
…a metronome, giving us a common time. Jessie’s been going for at least twenty minutes, clearly perspiring, but so alive. She pulls the gray rug off of the tiny stage and into the big empty space of the dance floor. Two chairs and a card table make a room, and mirror Jeanine and I sitting in our own chairs on the other side of the hall. With effort and abandon, she shifts the rug almost 180 degrees, upending limited perspective, reminding me of all of the breathing trees beyond these thin walls…
…she lapses into speaking “commit this to memory… it’s not going to be like that” — I can’t help but think of our conversation about how someone had told her, “keep reminding yourself, it’s not going to be like that,” in the months before her father’s death. You can’t prepare for someone’s death, it’s not going to be like you imagine it. You can’t imagine it. The same seems true for this task of performing nonstopping for thirty minutes. Jessie must imagine that she can do it, but what-it-is is so inherently unstable. It comes out of her but is more than she can conceive of beforehand, as well as being more than I can witness, let alone write down…
…does it mean anything that Trisha Brown also grew up somewhere on this Peninsula? It certainly seems to mean something to the three of us. I admire Jessie for taking up the task of ambassador-of-postmodern(?)-dance with as much gusto as she embraces the role of performer. Exhausting but necessary. Jeanine has read some of Trisha’s diaries as a part of a project she did with Trisha’s company and, on one of our hikes, tells us about how it changed her understanding of Trisha’s work, seeing the ancient trees and moss and the water. Remembering the waterfall, another nonstopping entity, brings me back to the dancing yesterday, to the sense of Jessie connecting to a gurgling geyser six or seven feet beneath the floor…
…Jessie is buried in the corner, at the end of that long bank of chairs, impaled by the card table? — no, crushed like a bug, arms and legs emerging comically, maybe? — you can’t be impaled by something so flat! She’s improvising, yes, but she’s returned to a place/image she visited yesterday, she’s returned to the scene of the crime. What does the mess of this room mean? I flash on my mother’s shoes in the hallway of my parents house, years after her death. We dance with detritus. I think about Jeanine and I sweeping the floor a few minutes ago — or was that yesterday? Memory is so slippery — I have already forgotten so much. But forgetting is also part of the work of watching, I tell myself. Now Jessie is standing still in the doorway that leads up to the stage and into the bathroom — a tension earned by exertion hangs in the air. Which way will she exit, where will she reenter? Shifting of objects, a bricklayer’s labor of love. Now she’s on the stage, standing in front of an amateurish mural of the mountains outside. “There was something I was gonna say up here…”
When writing reviews, which I have done on and off for years, I try to polish my initial impressions into a confidently stated analysis that synthesizes description, context, and opinion. The above is almost the opposite of that. This is Rehearsal, not Performance. I will edit the forum we create here, but I do hope that this will be a place for messy ideas.
I take inspiration from these after-images and from the do-it-yourself politics of what Jessie is creating on the Peninsula — using dance to forge local relationships and make the ideas that animated her career in New York legible in a radically different environment. Write to me at samuelbh@illinois.edu with your own ideas about choreography and how you’re rehearsing them.
Samuel Bennett Hanson, Editor of Rehearsal