Gibney Presents: VIM VIGOR

NYC PREMIERE: PUNCHLINE

September 28-30, 2023
The Theater (Studio H)
7:30 PM ET

All Tickets $25

You are waiting for the PUNCHLINE… no need to worry, it happens to all of us. The 2023-2024 Performance Season opens with the debut of celebrated physical dance theater company VIM VIGOR and the NYC premiere of PUNCHLINE.  VIM’s latest work translates comedic structure into physical form, drawing audiences into a cathartic experience of humor, angst and the sublime. Through movement and radical storytelling, audiences will find themselves embedded in a living landscape where three performers traverse the space between comedy and death; wrestling with the inevitable while delighting in the transcendent awareness of limited time.  PUNCHLINE features choreography and performance by Shannon Gillen and Jason Cianciulli and is set to an original electronica sound score by Marshall Chadbourne.

ABOUT SHANNON GILLEN

Shannon Gillen is the Artistic Director of VIM VIGOR. Her creative work has been commissioned across the USA, Canada, Central America, South America and Europe. Projects include commissions by L.A. Dance Project, dance.films for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, b12 Festival, fashion label Phelan for NY fashion week, Danceworks at the Lobero Theatre, Hubbard Street 2, Gibney Dance Company, Over het lj, Jacob’s Pillow, Boston Dance Theater at the ICA, Ruvuelo, Mainfranken Theater Würzburg, Arts Umbrella, Solo-Tanz Theater Festival, TIF theater, de danseurs, as a think big choreographer-in-residence at Staatsoper Hannover and at Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton where she was a choreographer in residence. Notable festivals and venues where her work has been seen include Springboard Danse Festival in Montreal, New York Live Arts, Prisma Festival in Panama, Judson Church, Pulse Art Fair/Art Basel, Bryant Park, NYC’s River to River Festival, Perry Mansfield, and the Joyce. Prior to founding VIM VIGOR, she danced for Johannes Wieland’s at the Staatstheater Kassel in Germany. Gillen is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. She is a graduate of The Juilliard School and earned her MFA from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.

ABOUT VIM VIGOR

VIM VIGOR is a physical dance theater company under the artistic direction of Shannon Gillen and co-choreographer Jason Cianiculli. Founded as a collaborative think tank, VIM brings together innovative and profoundly gifted artists from around the world to create original, cutting edge, dance theater creations. Interdisciplinary by nature, VIM’s research calls upon whole performers to activate unstable universes where conscious reality collides with dream space and characters rise and fall in virtuosic action, often using cinematic approaches to light, sound, and time to amplify the uncanny experience of each work. Since its founding in 2015, the company has created five evening length shows (SEPARATI, 2016), (FUTURE PERFECT, 2017), (FOREVER, 2019), (TOGETHER IS CLOSE ENOUGH, 2021), (PUNCH LINE, 2023), seven half-evening works, and received over thirty commissions with professional companies and universities across the USA, Canada, Central America, South America and Europe. In tandem with building new works, VIM established an education platform in 2015, dedicated to supporting the professional lives of artists of all ages with ongoing classes, workshops, and annual intensives. In 2023/24 VIM will teach and create new work for the b12 festival in Berlin, Henny Jurriëns inAmsterdam, and the Arthur Miller Theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Learn more 

Photo credit: Kirk Donaldson