J Dellecave is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary performance-maker, scholar, and educator concerned with how bodily experience intersects with external fields of social, cultural, and political knowledge. Their recent body of evening length and endurance format performance straddles the genres of dance, performance art, and movement-based theater. Current projects include Land/escapes (endurance improvisation in collaboration with Zavé Martohardjono), Mostess (five-course performance experience), and Railroad Legacy (an ongoing movement exploration of complex rhythmic walking patterns). J holds a PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside; MA in Performance Studies from New York University; and BFA in Dance from Temple University. They are currently Visiting Assisant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University.
In Fall 2018 J taught graduate students in the Department of Theatre and Dance, University at Buffalo, where Caboose was choreographed in collaboration with MFA dance students. From 2015 to 2017 J was employed as a full-time lecturer in Dance History and Theory at San Diego State University. In collaboration with students and faculty, Foghorns, Trains, and Incongruent Sentences was choreographed for the University Dance Company. In April 2014, Angry Women REvisited—a fifteen-person original ensemble performance—played to sold outs houses at HERE Arts Center. Micro-Mini Maxi Mystery Theater: En Total premiered at Dixon Place for three nights in October 2012. Nocturnal Beaver, a five-day endurance installation in collaboration with filmmaker Sarolta Jane Vay premiered at MIX: New York City Queer Experimental Film Festival in November 2012. In 2011, J’s evening-length solo show, BLOWHOLE—an epistolary collaboration with writer July Oskar Cole—toured the west stopping in Riverside, Los Angeles, Tucson, and San Francisco.
J’s professional production credits include work with New York City based performers KJ Holmes, Jen Abrams, Julie Mayo, Jenny Romaine (Great Small Works Visual Theater Company) and Philadelphia theater provocateur Greg Giovanni (Big Mess Theater and Big Mess Cabaret). In 2012, J played the lead role, Water Nymph, in the play The Gold Fish: Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined—a slapstick musical about salmon migration and water rights. The Gold Fish play was performed in Sacramento, California at the Crocker Museum, and the Gold Fish Casino (film version) premiered at the 2017 San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. From 1999-2003 J served as curator, produced, and toured their own and other peoples work nationally and in Canada, most extensively (but not exclusively) as part of the P Power Performance Project: Supergirl Power Activate – a multi-year, multi-genre touring event that interrogated representations of women and power and literally created a cohort of superheriones across the country.
J’s writing has appeared in Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, Women and Performance Journal, and itch Dance Journal. J has received grants and funding from Brown Arts Initiative, the Department of Education Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, San Diego State University, University of California Riverside, Mellon Summer Studies, Art Works in Different Places, Dance Advance, and the Leeway Foundation, and production grants and subsidies from HERE Arts Space (NYC), Links Hall (Chicago), Patrick’s Cabaret (Minneapolis) and Noh Space (San Francisco).
Contact J @ j dot dellecave dot phd at gmail dot com
