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Breaking Ground   

Breaking Ground combines round wall skate boarders with company dancers for video and live performance. The round wall skate park redefines the space it inhabits by transitioning a previously underused and neglected recreational area into a youth friendly, community developed skateboard park The round bowl construction is a design of constant curves with inclines and hills of elevation that mimic the waves of the ocean. The steep plunges and the unusual balance points create a dynamic language that can be experienced by both mover and viewer.
This public site is a unique environment that draws individuals invested in physical expression. It is dependent on cooperative response for its creation, considers the environment for its construction, and invests the community with a sense of ownership. This special environment is explored with dance and media, and with the community members who use it.

Jane Franklin's Breaking Ground is Made possible by a grant from the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region Creative Communities Initiative.

Incidence

Jane Franklin Dance is collaborating with composer Gina Biver and installation artist Howard Connelly to create the new work, Incidence. Daily life, even when highly structured, is influenced by chance. Timing sets off incidents that may be fortunate, disruptive, surprising or catastrophic. A functional light weight kinetic sculpture will trigger the order of dance and music segments. A random or an intentional ‘turning’ of the sculpture cues the performers. The installation works on the principle of a roulette wheel. In Roulette, a croupier spins a wheel in one direction, and then spins a ball in the opposite direction. In Incidence the music and dance meet by coincidence and are dependent upon the turn of the installation.

Incidence has been selected by the Cultural Development Corporation for the 08-09 Season at the Mead Theater Lab Program at Flashpoint, 916 G Street, NW, Washington, D.C

Temporal Interference

In Temporal Interference dancers carve out an environment of sound and color with digital artist Bryan Leister's live video and electro acoustic Theremin and Gina Biver's music composition.  Movement resurfaces to recall the familiar changed by time.  The companion work, In Hiding, uses fabric panels, shadow and the human form.  Layered projections by artist Becky Heavner alternately reveal and conceal the performers, becoming both a barrier and a passageway to presence.

Jane Franklin’s choreography is full of arresting visual pictures, including a repeated motif of the trio holding their arms toward the ceiling in exaltation—representing vividly Temporal Interference’s gentle tugging at the fabric of space and time.

 -- Nick Green, Washington City Paper

Sound Walk

Jane Franklin’s community workshops involve people in dance, those who could have sworn they couldn’t dance a step, and including those who speak little or no English. The sounds from these workshops are the basis for the original music composition by Gina Biver and Jane Franklin’s resulting dance, Sound Walk. Chaotic resonance, echoing footsteps, and varied language permeates the four part work performed by company dancers as well as children and adults from the community. Original sound samples were collected in October 2007 from dance workshops held at Arlington Mill Community Center, Langston Brown Senior Center, Walter Reed Senior Center, James K Polk Elementary and in studio workshops held for Ft. Henry Gardens Affordable Housing Corporation after school program.

Jane Franklin doesn't shy away from unusual ideas....always experiemental, always deeply attuned not just to the bodies onstage but the space theyu move in, the sounds they move to.

- Arion Berger, The Washington Post Express

Ridge Line uses descriptions from the Civil War.  

Wonderfully evocative, Ridge Line, examines the cost of the Civil War, to the soldiers, their loved ones, and to the land itself.  Weaving together dance, video, and text from the era, Ridge Line  is a powerful look at our country’s history that seems especially meaningful in the context of the current Iraq War.   The music by Judith Shatin, Director of the Virginia Center for Computer Music at the University of Virginia, incorporates electronically-manipulated text.  Writings by a soldier in the Army of the Potomac are read by Civil War historian Ed Ayers.  Backdrop images from Manassas, Centreville, Petersburg, and Gettysburg interweave into a stunning intermittent tableau by multi-media artist Lars Issa.

Jane Franklin wowed with her "Clear Cut" with backdrop pictures of the Civil War. It gave a powerful anti-war statement as it showed how violence moved from the battlefield into the maddening crowds.

-Bob Anthony, Review 4 U