JONATHAN MEYER
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
You will be traveling to a strange place. It will be disconcerting; we mean to dislodge you from the familiar. But we will oversee all your travel arrangements and provide you with the tools you need to negotiate this baffling, beautiful, and eerily familiar realm. Because in strange lands you remember things you thought you’d forgotten. Because on journeys you discover hidden strengths. Because as a child you assembled strange and magical kingdoms the loss of which your adult self may grieve. To this vast unknown, bring courage, bring attention. However wildly the dark winds of this wilderness may blow, we will attend to you. There will be the flood of warmth in the wake of fear; there will be the pulsing thrill of discovery; there will be the sudden presence of that shuddering wonder that resides still in your cells. It is there in the resonance between the body seen and the body witnessing. It is there in the lived liquidity of the dance performance, each one’s body their ultimate source of authority: free to feel, to know, and to choose.
BIO
Somatically driven, Jonathan Meyer works to develop an idiosyncratic movement palette blurring grace and awkwardness, building strange lands that can delight, baffle, and open new possibilities. A gymnast in high school, Jonathan Meyer discovered dance at Oberlin College where he studied release technique and critical theory with Nusha Martynuk and Ann Cooper Albright. After a capoeira immersion in Brazil with Maestre Medicina, he returned to college to receive an undergraduate degree in dance from UNC Greensboro. Meyer has danced for The High Risk Group, Pierre-Paul Savoie, Asimina Chremos, and The Seldoms. In addition to dance, Meyer has worked with at-risk youth in wilderness therapy programs in Utah teaching primitive skills, and is a Certified Practitioner of Body-Mind Centering®. In 2002 Meyer founded Khecari in Taos, New Mexico. In 2006, Meyer moved Khecari to Chicago, and shortly thereafter he began his intensive collaboration and partnership with Julia Rae Antonick, with whom he runs the company. Through Khecari, Meyer and Antonick create and present their own work, in addition to choreographing collaboratively. Meyer has been a CDF Lab Artist & RDDI participant, and an artist in residence at Djerassi, Ragdale, Hambidge, Abigail, The Kohler Art Center, Links Hall, The Chicago Cultural Center, and The Chicago Park District.
