I Am YEG Arts Series: Jen Mesch

Contemporary dancer and choreographer Jen Mesch’s creativity is seemingly boundless. She doesn’t shy away from new adventures and challenges, whether it’s a fascinating new collaboration with an experimental musician or mastering a new artform (in recent years she’s added film to her repertoire). She’s a multi-disciplinary artist in the broadest sense and embraces cross-training not only in dance, but in other schools of thought such as philosophy and science, and by staying in tune with her community.

This week on the YEG Arts blog, we catch up with the multi-talented artist, Jen Mesch.

Tell us about your connection to Edmonton and what keeps you living and working here.

I moved to Edmonton a little over 13 years ago from New Jersey. My husband who’s a composer got a job working at the University of Alberta and I started working here as a healthcare worker. I guess my sort of ​“Edmonton origin story” in dance is that I looked up what kinds of things were happening and found Mile Zero Dance. I saw this photograph of Gerry Morita [Mile Zero Dance’s Artistic Director] in a fake fur coat in front of a barn with these wild sunglasses, drinking a cup of tea, doing a little bit of a dance pose – and I knew I was going to be fine in Edmonton! Mile Zero has really been a great place for me, I have performed there as an independent choreographer, and since the beginning, I really was welcomed with open arms into that contemporary community and just this year I decided to be on the Board. It has been kind of a home base for me as an independent choreographer.

As a multi-disciplinary artist, is there a common thread you bring to all of your storytelling? Are there themes you find yourself revisiting time and time again?

I think people look at dance and see a story – that’s a normal thing for humans to do – to look for meaning or a story, but [as dancers] we’re not actually trained in storytelling. I think that’s a specific skill, it’s literary. People often don’t ask the same thing of music, and dance is sort of uniquely situated in that we’re connected very strongly to music. Obviously, we also have a strong connection with theatre and performance art. But we’re also completely different from all of them. I definitely try to steer away from storytelling and I think that’s hard in a big theatre town (it’s a big literary and music town too.) I think it’s hard for people outside of the dance community to find their way into non-narrative work. But the common themes for me are that I tend to work as a soloist as an independent choreographer. I’m pretty reclusive in my daily life so I do a lot of solo work and a lot of the themes involve solitude, organic sorts of landscapes and in the case of my current work Go Where Light Is, I guess outer space and the universe are included in an organic landscape.

What’s one of the biggest professional risks you’ve taken, and how did it influence where you are today?

The biggest professional risk I ever took was deciding to become a dancer at age 22 because I didn’t study dance as a child. [As a young adult] I did start taking dance classes, and then I went on to major in engineering. There was a talent show at my engineering university and I entered one of my little dance pieces and won first place. The $50 prize meant I could buy my chemical engineering textbook; I was so happy and relieved. Eventually, I dropped out of engineering and told my parents I wanted to be a dancer, which was, I think pretty wild of me to do. I mean, I’d had just twice-a-week classes at my community college in modern dance. I had come back from dropping out of engineering school and I asked my dance teacher what I needed to do. She said, Take as much ballet as you possibly can, and take jazz and modern – take everything. So I did. I took all the money from my minimum wage job and took every dance class that I could take. I was in classes five or six days a week. I don’t see myself as a super high-level dancer at this point in my life, but I can’t believe how much I’ve done and have been able to do. So, I guess that my advice to other people is to try. You don’t know unless you do and put everything into it. It could have gone nowhere for me. I could have changed my mind, but here I am.

What’s one piece of advice you wish that you had received when you were starting out in dance?

I was an adult when I started studying dance so it’s a bit different than when you started out as a kid. I started with some already firm ideas of who I was and what I wanted dance to be for myself, but I think one piece of advice I wish I had (which I do anyway) is the notion of cross-training. Both physically and in terms of genres or disciplines, I think it’s really important that people learn about other artforms, learn about other schools of thinking, about philosophy, and the sciences. All of those things make us more rounded human beings and should inform our practices as artists.

Tell us a little bit about the unique characteristics and challenges of dance in contrast with other art disciplines. What do you wish people better understood about dance?

Well, I think it’s changing a little bit, but there are some biases against dance (at least in North America) that dance is sort of inherently female and that it’s inherently recreational. So, I think it gets discounted. People understand that you can be a recreational photographer; you can be a professional photographer. I think people do understand that there are ballet dancers that are very highly trained, but it seems so unattainable for most people. That is a big wall that I think we’re all trying to figure out how to break down a little bit – these hierarchies in dance.

Another disadvantage is that it costs a lot of money to put it on; it’s very labor intensive; and it’s a very personnel intensive art form. Dance is seen as being mostly for girls and women, even at young ages. It’s very hard to find role models for boys who want to dance and yet it’s often men who then become the major choreographers and the major directors of dance companies. Women are trying to find their voice at a time when we’re also stepping aside to make more room for more kinds of people and more kinds of dancers. I think that’s a challenge for everyone in the arts – to make more room.

Another significant problem for Edmonton and anywhere really, is that compared to other art forms, there are fewer dance programs at the post-secondary level. Edmonton currently has nothing like that as opposed to very fully realized theatre and music departments. It’s something that the dance community is trying to address. At the same time as we’re trying to increase scholarships and increase awareness of dance, we’re also trying to increase awareness of each other’s dance forms and dance communities.

Tell us about your most recent dance project, Go Where Light Is.

Go Where Light Is has been a really exciting and challenging project. Because I normally work as a soloist, the larger-scale things that I’ve done have been with improv structures that have been quite loose. Like I construct a general timbre of the piece and they’re usually people spread out over large areas so that people sort of come upon little things happening in different places in an area. With this one, I don’t want to say this is my pandemic piece, but I did really miss dancing with everybody. I just had it in my heart, I wanted to do something really big with lots of people in it. I also had these really strong eerie feelings of the universe really not just being something out there in outer space or something that requires technology to perceive. That it’s really just around us all of the time. And all these distances of course are relative. And even during the day, it’s not something that happens at night, where we can see stars. The stars are just always there. And I just started thinking about how strange the world is as we’ve created these structures and systems around us. I started thinking more and more about the uniqueness of the human animal and the context of the universe without all of these constructs around us. So that’s kind of where I started. There are a lot of themes that come through in the piece, the music steers a lot of it. The piece was written by my husband Scott Smallwood and his collaborative partner Stephan Moore.

Tell us more about your filmmaking.

In 2016 – 17, I was the artist in residence at Harcourt House. The residency is meant to support the work of an artist as they advance or emerge into a new area of their work. I was in my late 40s by then and I was dealing with lots of injuries and thinking a lot about what I wanted to be doing and about the online presence of dance. And I started thinking I would like to learn how to do dance for film and during the residency. I started taking film classes at the University of Alberta and FAVA. I made some little films in those classes, and they became part of the exhibition at the end of my residency, and then I found out that you could submit online to film festivals, so I got into a bunch of film festivals which was weird and fun. I felt a little bit upset because I’d been making films for, like, not even a year and I was getting awards for filmmaking. You could just never do that with dance! It’s said it takes ten years to make a dancer. I told my teacher that and he said, ​“Well it’s different for you because you’re already an artist.” I suppose that’s kind of true, I already have strong compositional ideas and content ideas. It is a very different medium. It turns out I really love editing and it goes back to this whole thing of kind of being a person of solitude.

Can you tell us about a hidden gem in Edmonton’s dance scene that you think more people should know about?

Mile Zero Dance is opening up a new space in the next little while in the Ritchie neighborhood and I’m really excited to see how that’s going to affect everything. Both in terms of having a more solid and secure location for themselves and what it’s going to bring to dance. That’s probably the thing I’m most excited about.

Want more YEG Arts Stories? We’ll be sharing them here and on social media using the hashtag #IamYegArts. Follow along! Click here to learn more about Jen Mesch.

Listen to Jen Mesch tell her story on CBC Radio’s Radio Active show! Aired March 23, 2023.

About Jen Mesch

To say that dancer/​choreographer Jen Mesch inhabits any performance she gives is an understatement. Described as enigmatic, unusually perceptive and artistically fearless, Mesch’s wide variety of interests often lead her to unique collaborations in unexpected places.

Mesch has created over 200 works for dance performances, film, and experimental theatre in the US and Canada. She has performed with Cindy Baker, Dawn Cargiulo Berman (Momix), Penny Hutchinson (Mark Morris Dance Group), Jack Magai (Troy Chainsaw Ensemble), Linda Mannheim (Martha Graham Dance Company), Jennifer Monson (Birdbrain Dance), Gerry Morita (Mile Zero Dance), Susan Tenney (Jane Erdman Dance) and Kimberly Young (a canary torsi). For over a decade, Mesch has worked primarily with experimental musicians and has performed with Roger Admiral, Nico Arnáez, Allison Balcetis, Stephan Moore, Will Northlich-Redmond, Scott Smallwood, and Nate Wooley. She was the 2016 – 2017 Artist in Residence at Harcourt House which culminated in a two month dance, film, and visual art installation in fall 2017. Her film Hard White Spring received the award for Outstanding Experimental Film or Video at FAVA Fest and it was a semi-finalist in Cinema d’iDEA festival in Rome. Her first film, Soft Red Winter was screened at the Venice Short Film Festival. Mesch also teaches dance improvisation and technique, and her writings on dance have appeared in The Dance Current (Canada) and on her own Dance Conspiracy blog.