Zac Whittenburg

2023 Independent Artist Residency at Trillium Arts

Zac will continue exploring the creative and expressive potential of editing and layering multiple dance videos recorded by a fixed camera. This approach “reflects better than single-source footage my experience of movement,” he says, “and expands how dance can represent the passage of time and its effect on the self, by making sequential streams of presence simultaneous. The images overlap and intersect in unexpected, sometimes wonderful ways that mirror how memories inform each other and impact our comprehension of the present moment.”

He began experimenting with this approach in 2017, when he created Another One of Us for presentation at the Mississippi Dance Festival; that video referenced a previous work, One of Us, that he made in 2008 during a residency at Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as a then-member of the contemporary performance ensemble Molly Shanahan / Mad Shak. Other examples of this format include the 60-second video Once I Had a Love, created for THAW 2021: ABUNDANCE, a program of Links Hall in Chicago; and Pink Polo, created for the 20th anniversary of Lucky Plush Productions, also in Chicago.

Zac’s ideas and responses cross-pollinate his creative, generative, and editorial practices, for example: movement input can be processed and expressed through writing and vice versa. One component of his process during an Independent Artist Residency at Trillium Arts will be to record in writing his questions, discoveries, and conclusions about the project as he develops it. This writing component will produce material that could later be utilized to contextualize, introduce, and frame the work.

PC: Zachary Whittenburg

ongoing RESearch

Layered, composite video opens multiple creative and expressive pathways:

It reflects better than single-source footage my experience of improvised movement. Images of partial opacity reflect the impermanence of movement and the permeability of the moving body as a subject and an object in space and time.

It honors multipotentiality — the fact that any movement choice is just one of many available to me in a given moment. Committing to just one image per moment can feel, to me, artificially confining or reductive.

It allows me to represent myself as a person who strives to minimize the material effects of his presence and consumption. It shows my body as somewhat gossamer and ghostly, the way I feel when I dance or ride noiselessly through the city on my bicycle, producing no pollution, barely leaving a trace. It tempers the permanence of a recording with a degree of ephemerality that echoes the fleeting nature of live performance.


ABOUt

Zachary Whittenburg has worked in Chicago’s cultural sector since 2002, in arts advocacy and journalism, marketing and communications, and as a consultant on a variety of programs for artist support and equitable funding. A regular contributor to Dance Magazine, Zac is founding board secretary for the Chicago Dance History Project and, as associate director of marketing and communication at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, he represented the organization on the Chicago Dancemakers Forum consortium. He is currently arts program officer at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

A working artist for 13 years in Canada and the U.S., he created and performed choreography with companies including BJM Danse Montréal, Hubbard Street, Lucky Plush Productions, and Pacific Northwest Ballet, after which he was dance editor at Time Out Chicago magazine and communications and engagement director at Arts Alliance Illinois.

Originally from the Rocky Mountains near Boulder, Colorado, Zac has guest-lectured and led workshops at California State University–Long Beach, Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, the University of Saskatchewan, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

PC: Derrick Alexander