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Jmy James Kidd makes dances, textiles and community spaces. She is the founder of Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, CA. Choreographic commissions include REDCAT, The Kitchen, Made in LA 2014, The Broad, The Getty, Pacific Standard Time 2013. Residencies include Massachusetts Institute of Technology, BOFFO, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. She is visioning a Music and Dance Temple to be built somewhere sometime in the next 10 years. She frequently collaborates with her wife, musician Tara Jane ONeil (musical collaborator) Insta: @jameskidd_studio.
Perin Hailey McNelis is a dancer and botanist based in Patagonia, Arizona. Perin holds a BFA in dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Perin started working with James Kidd in 2012 as a dancer in the Sunland Dancers group and as the PR manager for Pieter Performance Space.
Perin has performed at the Skirball Cultural Center, Machine Project’s Mystery theater, the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial, the Getty Museum, the Broad Museum and various galleries. Perin returned to her home in Arizona in 2015 to pursue interests in regionally specific ethnobotany and ecological work in the borderlands. Perin joined the Borderlands Restoration Network horticulture team in 2015 and now is the Assistant Manager for the Native Plant Materials program where she manages the seed lab and coordinates art+ecology programming. Perin is passionate about somatic practices, activism and geography – particularly in the form of land stewardship.
Books mentioned in the interview were: The Wild Kindness and A Pattern Language.
[…] Jmy James Kidd lives and works in California. She spoke to us in late October as the pandemic continued on. At the time she was working with her long time dance collaborator, Perin Hailey McNelis, on a piece called Believers. Although the duo has made many dances together in the past, working in close physical proximity in this way felt familiar and yet unusual at this time. The pair have no performances lined up and do not know whether they ever will, but Kidd remarked that the dance not only feels like the right thing to do for her body it also helps maintain her mental health during this difficult time. Until recently, Kidd ran a dance studio in Los Angeles. When the pandemic hit, she and her wife decided to move to the high desert where she build and began working in a much smaller studio space. To hear how she has adapted to this and more about her collaborative work including some words from her collaborator, as well as what made Kidd leave her previous work as a dancer in New York, listen to the complete interview. […]
[…] Jmy James Kidd lives and works in California. She spoke to us in late October as the pandemic continued on. At the time she was working with her long time dance collaborator, Perin Hailey McNelis, on a piece called Believers. Although the duo has made many dances together in the past, working in close physical proximity in this way felt familiar and yet unusual at this time. The pair have no performances lined up and do not know whether they ever will, but Kidd remarked that the dance not only feels like the right thing to do for her body it also helps maintain her mental health during this difficult time. Until recently, Kidd ran a dance studio in Los Angeles. When the pandemic hit, she and her wife decided to move to the high desert where she build and began working in a much smaller studio space. To hear how she has adapted to this and more about her collaborative work including some words from her collaborator, as well as what made Kidd leave her previous work as a dancer in New York, listen to the complete interview. […]