We were lucky to catch up with Jes DeVille recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jes, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

The most meaningful project I have worked on is currently underway! Forgetting Tree is a meandering exploration of dialogues with (and love letters to) the natural world. It features an intergenerational cast of musicians, dancers, circus performers, scenographers and botanical artists tapping into their relationships to self, each other, and our changing environmental landscapes – occurring in a built sensory garden at Z Space theater, San Francisco November 3-5.

I like to use the tools of ritual and ceremony (procession, repetition, glossolalia, active stillness, surrealism…) to create strange but true moments that recruit audiences into spaces of social practice. In Forgetting Tree, I am choreographing dances to speak to what happens after society breaks cycles of exploitation around love, labor, and living systems. We will be playing plants as musical instruments, inviting audiences into nature’s nightlife, and for those that look up in the sky – we’ll be bounding from the rafters with aerial dancing.

My favorite method of performance melds contemporary circus-arts and sideshow stunts with interdisciplinary dance, spoken word, song, photo and film. There is something exciting, transcendent and transformative about pushing body, theatre, and audience to an edge – tapping into an individual and collective sense of resilience through shock and awe. I am inspired by nature’s ability to sustain for billions of years performing similar stunts – organizing systems through chaos, tension, branching, explosions and then…regeneration. I believe that in making beauty of my dancing with serpents, ascending a ladder of machetes, flying through the air, dancing barefoot on broken glass, or performing human pincushion – I am glueing fragments of identities in ways that tell universal stories of survival.

This particular piece is informed by land-based study at sites of recurring natural disasters. Site-specific research plays a tremendous role in my performance-making, as I leverage a permaculture design framework usually seen in agriculture to tap into the histories and capabilities of each performance site and social dynamics of artists involved. It’s a way of making sure that the work emphasizes earth care, people care, and equitable fair share at every step of the creative process. Between the sugarcane workers of Puerto Rico honoring the mangroves of that region – and the Gullah Geechee folk steeped in blackwater – I honor the fact that I would not have my relationship to movement (bomba, hip hop, house, salsa, etc.) without the lore associated with these folks and their ways of reclaiming their land. I consider my process to be a cultural memory project, as it is reliant upon a great recovery effort that I can only take on with the help of a collective intergenerational knowing during these times where so much of how we sense the world seems dormant.

Jes, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m a Nuyorican dance-theatre artist, born in Queens, raised in Brooklyn. I work in a hands-on manner in the office, on the dance floor, in front of and behind the screen. I began dancing as a child and was lucky enough to have some great adults who chose to invest in my imagination. I was attending Saint Ann’s for high school when I got my first performance opportunities dancing in student showcases for Wunmi Olaiya, Fiona Marcotty, and Edisa Weeks; also spending time with the late choreographer Stanley Love and training rigorously with a scene that had grown around the work of Safi Thomas. NYC was a hotbed for street dance and cultural movement. I took all the classes I could and loved the social storytelling around the radical histories of these dance forms that I encountered along the way.

Stanley toured me through Juilliard and mentored me closely, introducing me to site-specific performances that activated outdoor spaces in unique ways. He was also maybe the first queer mentor I had ever had and there was something compelling about the ways this impacted his approach to dance. A queer identity informed how he moved through the world, took up space, and intentionally made room for healing. I suppose this interest carried over into adulthood where I started to look for opportunities that could help me to use choreography as a form of cartography, mapping relationships to my own identity and built or natural landscapes over time. In 2017 I started Openhaus Athletics, an arts management consultancy to share with others what lessons I collected on my journey. Eventually I landed myself a position in the nonprofit arts sector as Managing Director and co-curator of nomadic dance festival San Francisco Trolley Dances 2019-2021; an exciting opportunity that also happened to coincide with the challenging pandemic timeline. The theaters went black, my team was forced to go virtual, we tried hard not to lose our minds.

As a result, my art-making sprouted a new limb – a curiosity around the ways live art might inform and transform culture during times of unrest, nudging us back towards health. When you work as a full-time creative you have to wear many hats. You learn to tackle the fundraising, the costume design and sewing, the prop making, the marketing, the filming, the performing! So many things. You must be a force of nature and even as one, it can burn you out – And it did. It was the burnout which made this idea of arts & wellness a more prominent focus in my life. I returned. to school to study Global & Community Health, working to use integrative arts therapies to help communities reconcile relationships with the places we call Home as a consultant, an administrator, a coach, and most importantly, an advocate. My work shifts from day to day. I help build healing arts ecosystems co-curating exhibitions honoring the grief-work of local firefighters post wildfire season, teaching outdoor youth dance classes with an aerial dance troupe, managing community performance events reclaiming former PG&E land in historic Hunters Point, scaffolding equine therapists, strategic planning for somatic herbalists and community clinics, or even staging a circus in a sensory garden. If awe and altruism are inextricably linked, my role is to create artful access points for people to find their way to wonder for the natural world.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I feel the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is being able to lean into ownership of a kaleidoscopic identity. It means taking risks, trusting in the tangents, and following the flow.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I honestly think my social media following came from my early days touring and performing burlesque-cabaret. I tried on so many aesthetics, personas…wigs! You name it. I cast a wide net and at times it was an absolute mess. It was a lot of fun but it didn’t leave very much room for growth. I can say by far that the best advice I have is to find your authentic voice in marketing your artistic practice. Live your life first, it’s much easier to maintain that way. Use social media for what it’s for – building relationships across borders. Your audience will appreciate going on the journey with you. Be obsessed. Find the love in what you do because it shows!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.danceoutdoors.com
• Instagram: @devilledance_co
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/jesdeville

Image Credits
Becca Ann Henry Thais Aquino Misty Rusk Christina Linskey