Residency Judith State at Veem House Amsterdam

In the frame of the Creative Crossroad activity, Judith State was selected by 4 Culture to receive a 2 years structural support by the LLB network to work amongst others on her production "Ember".

This support includes a co-production support by 4Culture and residencies at Veem House Amsterdam and Uferstudios Berlin.


Ember

"Something from childhood and something from playing, something from the seriousness and anxiety of adulthood, a little bit of how we love at different ages and how we sometimes wish we could stop time. Memories. Images that our minds randomly decide to keep and project over and over again.

A small capsule for future intelligence.

Ember means human."

Residency at Veem House Amsterdam

For this residency Veem House collaborated with Henny Jurriëns Studio, an International training center for dance professionals based in Amsterdam.

Judith State is a multidisciplinary artist trained in classical ballet. She’s a dance scholarship holder of Broadway Dance Centre in New York, and danceWEB scholarship holder of ImpulsTanz in Vienna. She long collaborates with choreographer Massimo Gerardi and in 2018 is part of Eszter Salamon’s Monument 0.8: Manifestations. In 2016 Judith made her debut in cinema, and received a Gopo Award nomination for best supporting actress in Cristi Piuiu’s Sieranevada. In 2018 she ends up winning the Gopo for Best Actress in a leading role for her appearance in Monsters. by Marius Olteanu. After that Judith is the lead in The Father Who Moves Mountains (Daniel Sandu), Refuge (Liviu Marghidan), Zenith dance film (Krisztof Gyuri) and R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu).

In 2018 she created Emlék (translates to “remembrance” in Hungarian), an autobiographical modular project on remembering, consisting of a performance, a concert, a short film and movement/text workshops. In Veem House she worked on Ember, like her earlier work the title pays hommage to her part Hungarian heritage, and means “human” in Hungarian. While the idea for Ember and initial plan was already two years old, the residency in Veem House marks an early stage in her research. As time passed, and things changed, -working almost continuously in film, becoming a mother- Judith’s perception of what she wanted to research in Ember also changed. The two week residency in Veem House invited Judith to return to her practice as a choreographer, and back to her body as a dancer again.

During the residency Judith reflected many times on what it means to be an artist. When does one begin or stop performing. Trained in classical ballet, learning to train and forge her body to adhere to someone else’s vocabulary of movements, she is now interested in creating a vocabulary of her own, and using what is already there: the most habitual of gestures. Judith: “ I’m interested in the casual/natural movement of the body and the ways it can turn into "choreography" without adding aesthetics to it.”

We closed Judith’s residency with an Open Studio. Participants were invited into the space where she had been working for two weeks. They were introduced to the concept of the Open Studio as a moment of open and informal exchange. As audiences entered Judith’s studio she was already ‘performing’, and thus playing with the conventions of when an artists begins or stops. She shared her questions out loud in a stream of consciousness, while sometimes pausing and rewinding the track. Repeating words and movements creating a musicality in her speech, and a choreography in her habitual gestures.

Afterwards the audience engaged in a conversation about her practice, and the questions she was busy with. By opening up, and sharing her research Judith could reflect collectively with an audience on the thematics of ‘doing a performance’. Plus she could have an embodied experience of the dichotomy she was researching as she shifted from sharing or ‘performing’ her research to having a casual and informal exchange about it.