Studio Stories: Reminiscing on Twin Cities Dance with Hijack/Kristin Van Loon + Arwen Wilder Season 2 Episode 32

HIJACK is the Minneapolis-based choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. HIJACK is the confluence and clash of two independent compositional/kinesthetic impulses. Their dances embrace juxtaposition. Their dances house unlikely intimates and question “who is the enemy?” Specializing in the inappropriate, HIJACK is best known for "short-shorts:" pop song-length miniatures designed to deliver a sharp shock.Over the last 25 years they have created over 100 dances and performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal. HIJACK manipulates context by employing a site-specific approach to every performance and toying with audiences' expectations. HIJACK has performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory), Japan, Russia, Central America, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in Maine and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. HIJACK questions where and for whom contemporary dance is performed, gigging regularly in both social settings and concert settings.  HIJACK has enjoyed long relationships with Red Eye Collaborations (as part of their Critical Core), Bryant Lake Bowl Theater where their 1996 "Take Me To Cuba" was the theater’s first ever dance concert), Zenon Dance School (where they have taught every Wednesday morning for 18 years), and Walker Art Center where they have performed in every imaginable context including the opening of the McGuire Theater, at Dyke Night, First Free Saturday children’s programming, in the sculpture garden, and in the light of the Benson Film Collection in the Mediateque. In 2013, Walker Art Center commissioned “redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye” to celebrate twenty years of HIJACK and Contact Quarterly published the chapbook “Passing for Dance: A HIJACK Reader”.Their 2018-20 projects include: performing End Plays with Lisa Nelson, curating and hosting Future Interstates (a series of dance improvisation performances initiated by HIJACK and Body Cartography in 2015), creation and premiere of Jealousy (a collaboration with sculptor Ryan Fontaine and lighting designer Heidi Eckwall at Hair + Nails Gallery), touring an evening of dance with films to micro-cinemas and managing & dancing in the 2019 McKnight International Choreography residency of Galia Eibenshutz at Cedar Cultural Center.