To Being is a choreography of persistence in the heart of jeopardy and precarity: the body continues in ongoing change, relations transform, meanings proliferate and fade. A companion work to Durning’s acclaimed solo performance practice, inging, To Being is based on the decidedly chosen practice of nonstopping — always moving absent destination— always becoming, never arriving. A psychosocial experiment, To Being opens to a landscape where radically divergent desires converge and empathy unfolds. To Being is dance as both ontological inquiry and homage, a force against the absolute, the nameable. To Being is a composition of endurance, a sonata of devotion. To Being is an unending search for an imperative relationship to movement in which dichotomies between self and other, material and immaterial, thought and action, incessantly dissolve. But more than anything else, To Being asks: What’s at stake? Where’s the end? How can we give more when all we feel is that we’ve met our limit?

Created by Jeanine Durning with Julian Barnett and Molly Poerstel. Directed by Jeanine Durning. Performed by Julian Barnett, Jeanine Durning, and Molly Poerstel. Sound by Tian Rotteveel. Lighting by Joe Levasseur.

To Being was made possible, in part, through The Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program, funded, in part, by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Davis/Dauray Family Fund and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; by a Space Grant from BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and by a space grant from Abrons Art Center. In addition, Jeanine Durningresearched, developed and honed To Being with financial, administrative and residency support from the Dance in Process Program at Gibney Dance.

The first work in a series based on Durning’s performance practice “nonstopping,” inging proposes the insistent practice of unscripted nonstop languaging as performance, where speaker (performer) is in direct relation with listener (audience) at the moment of articulation. Part spoken word performance, part reverie, part dance, part oral biography, part meditation and psychotherapy, inging is a choreography of the mind, moving in the continuous present. It tracks the velocity of thought through a proprioceptive cascade of words. Both performer and audience are in perpetual disequilibrium, confronted with the limits of language as a paradigm for communication, knowledge and understanding. The body and its gesture emerge as the inevitable bridge between thought and language.

Created and performed by Jeanine Durning.

inging was first publicly performed in Amsterdam in 2010, and has since been invited to theaters, festivals, studios, museums and galleries in Berlin, Leuven, Zagreb, NYC, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Williamstown, and Chambersburg, with forthcoming performances in San Francisco in November 2015.

“Review: Jeanine Durning’s ‘To Being,’ a Dance Premiere in Queens”  – Siobhan Burke, New York Times

“Pushing Past Ourselves” – Jaime Shearn Coan, The Brooklyn Rail