Varvara is both a response to Alexander Rodchenko’s photograph “Performing Furniture” (1922), which features his artistic collaborator and life partner Varvara Stepanova, and to Stepanova’s body of creative work. One of the prominent Russian Constructivist artists, Stepanova’s endeavors include textiles, visual poetry, costumes, and set designs. Konstantin Rudnitsky, a Soviet theater critic of their time, wrote, “The human body was perceived as a machine: man had to learn to control that machine. It was the theatre’s function to demonstrate the fine tuning of the human ‘mechanisms’.”
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Varvara draws on Stepanova’s artwork as inspiration for movement making and comments on this Constructivist view of theatre’s function by exploring the body’s reaction to moving it and considering it as a mechanization versus perceiving and allowing it to be on its own unruly, chaotic mess of expression.
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The March 1st performance will include a pre-show discussion led by Anna Winestein of Ballet Russes Arts Initiative to help contextualize the historical period where Rodchenko made his work.
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TICKETS HERE

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About Jenna Riegel:

Jenna Riegel (Choreographer/Performer), originally from Fairfield, Iowa, is a dance artist and educator. Jenna holds an M.F.A. in Dance Performance form the University of Iowa and a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Maharishi International University. During her eleven-year performing career in NYC, Jenna toured and performed nationally and internationally as a company member of David Dorfman Dance, Alexandra Beller/Dances, Bill Young/Colleen Thomas & Company and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. She also danced with Daara Dance (choreographer Michel Kouakou), Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company, Shaneeka Harrell, Tania Isaac Dance and johannes weiland. Jenna taught classes in contemporary technique in New York City at Gina Gibney Dance Center, New York Live Arts, Mark Morris Dance Center, and 100 Grand Dance.

She has been on facutly in the dance departments of Barnard College, The Juilliard School and Virginia Commonwealth University. In addition, she has taught master classes at The Joffrey Ballet School, Columbia College, NYU, The New Schoool, Ohio State University, SUNY Purchase, Bard College Connecticut College and Williams College. Jenna has also been on faculty at the American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival and is currently an Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance at Amherst College.

Support for Varvara:

Varvara was supported (in part) by a grant from the Amherst College Faculty Research Award Program, as funded by The H. Axel Schupf ’57 Fund for Intellectual Life.

Varvara was funded in part by New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund, with generous support from the Aliad Fund at the Boston Foundation.

Funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.

About Anna Winestein:

Anna Winestein is a cultural historian, curator, and arts entrepreneur. In 2009 she co-founded the Eurasia-focused arts non-profit Ballets
Russes Arts Initiative, where she is Executive Director. She is currently also Director of Programs at Congregation Kehillath Israel in Brookline. She has previously served as Creative Director for the Hermitage Museum Foundation and a consultant on film and other
programming to museums as well as art research for collectors and dealers. Anna has curated exhibitions for the Boston Public Library and
Sotheby’s, among others, and lectured at the NGA, Sotheby’s Institute of Art (London), Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology (NY) and elsewhere. She has also authored, co-authored, edited or translated books, exhibition essays and articles for academic and lay audiences. She is a research affiliate of the Davis Center at Harvard University. A former Fulbright Scholar, Anna holds separate graduate and undergraduate degrees in history, economics, art history and painting from Boston University and Oxford University, where her dissertation examined artists from the Russian empire in Paris from 1870 to 1917. Her research encompasses visual art, dance, theater, film and social history and international cultural exchange.