Jo Andres

Jo Andres is both choreographer and filmmaker; her work defies easy classification. Her stage pieces weave projected film into a rich texture of mixed mediums with uniquely beautiful, holographic results. In Dreaming Out Loud, to name one, synchronized action unfolds across three screens, sometimes spilling out onto the stage and live bodies, and other times absorbing the dancers into the two-dimensional surface of the film. It is a tour de force of coordinated images.

Jo Andres' powerful and original body of film/dance/light work has shown in New York City at The Performing Garage, La Mama, E.T.C., The Kitchen, and St. Mark's Dancespace Project. She has toured to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Yale University, the San Francisco Art Institute, Light Work in Syracuse, NY, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, and throughout Europe. She has held numerous residences in the U.S., including the Exploratorium in San Francisco (the Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception).

Her film work has screened at festivals in Edinburgh, Melbourne, Zurich, Berlin, San Francisco, and in New York at The Public Theater, Millennium, and the New York Downtown Film Festival.

Jo Andres' new film Black Kites is both powerfully immediate and as enigmatic as her stage work. Black Kites is the outcome of a chance encounter between Andres and Sarajevan visual artist Alma Hajric. They met and became friends while on tour in Spain with their respective theater groups in 1988. At the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992 Hajric sent her journals with drawings and collages to Andres. Andres used these as the basis for Black Kites.

Alma Hajric still works and lives in Sarajevo, and she and Jo Andres continue to correspond.

Black Kites is a testament to survival and artistry, to imagination and reality. (09/09)

Black Kites
A film by Jo Andres, 1996, 26 min., Color
Based on 1992 journals of Bosnian visual artist Alma Hajric who was forced into a basement shelter to survive the siege of Sarajevo, BLACK KITES is th...