For bookings or full-length footage, email:
monteleonedance@gmail.com
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'Samvega' is a buddhist term describing spiritual shock. This work uses an intricately kinetic movement vocabulary with poetry and video projection to express euphoric and frightening collisions that knock one out of their normal reality tunnel. This work navigates various anecdotes dealing with adrenaline and aesthetic arrest, such as seeing the universe in a smile, intoxicating affection, a deer in headlights, or a point of contact between Mario and a Goomba.
"Samvega" (2018)
"Monteleone's performance was extraodinary. . . blew me away. . . the man, the sound, and the projected automobile were one lean mean machine"
--Critical Dance
"Neur0-" (2018)
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A retro multimedia videogame performance exploring the meta nature of thinking about thinking.
"Meditations on a Meta-Organism" (2017)
A one-man-band soloist and choreographer - who mixes his own music, commissions original curated video art, creates video game montages, records monologues, and controls his own lighting with the flick of a switch - Joe Monteleone is the rare control freak who can do it all and come out with a dazzlingly realized project. He performs his hyper-limber and symbol based choreography with dime-stopping precision while cleaving through the air with whip-snap limbs that suddenly slow down just enough to make sure that one gets the point.
--Huffington Post
"Y0UN1VERSE" (2017) 30 min
“YOUNIVERSE”, a collaboration between Monteleone Dance and Visual Barz LLC, reveals a fictional society’s attempt to make sense of its crumbling virtual reality. Joe Monteleone’s unprecedented movement invention interacts with video projection to illustrate the manipulation of personal reality tunnels and hermetic philosophy in a dystopian cyber zeitgeist. An elaborate arsenal of movement, prose, and video projection abstract this digital catastrophe.
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Babalon is a performance result of a psycho-spiritual process inspired by magician Aleister Crowley and his unique mythology. Babalon, a deity of myriad forms, is the tendency of cosmic forces to create infinitely without bias. The solo releases an onslaught of highly intricate movement phrases set to a collage of electronic, ambient, and interspecies sound mixed by the artist. The work expresses the potent heat of creation when creative process is not hindered by the desire for a result, but rather blissfully immersed in its own unfettered workings.
"BABALON::10,000 Forms" (2017) 8 min
"Exposition of Liquid Fragile Perishable Philosophy"
(2017) 5 min
Intricate movement vocabulary is set to a recorded poem by the artist that exploits figurative and literal containers and conventions. The poem speculates on the Indian concept of “Maya”, the illusionary world of name and form, while the body demonstrates these conceptual items through a hyper precise physical dialect; a living origami. This is the artist's second manifesto, also acting as a description of his unique movement methodology.
A movement experiment prototype that uses an audience interactive projection. The chosen participants draw figures on a plane of squares. When finished, the image explodes into a computational sequence of blips while the dancers move through complex partnering and intricate dialogues. This work collides cellular automata with automatic muscular tendency, oscillating between nuanced vocabulary and states of motion. The resulting systems illustrate the study known as “cybernetics”, exploring self-monitoring systems such as a missile, the human body, or even a civilization.
"Cybernetics" (2016) 12 min
"ANTIDENTITY:: Squaring The Circle"
(2016) 30 min
Began as a collaboration with the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership to address ecological issues facing the river and its inhabitants. The work creates a movement ecosystem illustrating Zen Buddhist philosophies. A “natural” installation is transmuted into a conventional designation of space, revealing metaphors of ancient Greek geometry and deep alchemical processes. This is both a group protocol and a ritual that collides the seemingly natural with the possibly manufactured, through transmuting installation, inviting a grossly curious dissonance to the unsuspecting viewer.
From grass to metal to skin to bone, this work mines away the interfaces between mind, body, and material, ultimately probing the rigid mental encapsulation that "identity" can institute. No animals were harmed in the creation of this work.
"Dexterity of Mouth and War"
(2016) 11 min
This solo is motivated by the imagery and information associated with the 16th tarot card, “The Tower”. The work transmutes the high effortful charge, often seen in full-bodied movement, into an articulate and dexterous vocabulary. The work conceptualizes language into will, and places volition into gestural warfare. Poignant tension moves through idiosyncratic form, deconstructing archetypal imaginary in the body down to finely tuned geometric design. The work invites political undertones, set to a complex mix of electronic and experimental sounds arranged by Joe Monteleone.
"MK Ultra Sound"
(2015) 15 min
Through a highly scrupulous interface between skin, computer, and projection, the duet reveals information on the aftermath of the CIA's illegal LSD experimentation on unwitting American citizens
(MK Ultra).
"Locavulary De Sign"
(2015) 25 min
Locavulary De Sign is part movement algorithm, a machine, and installation that reflects the cultural fabric of today’s Zeitgeist. The ubiquitous concrete and metallic edges that ornament urban functionality are flaunted in the factory that the dancers perform. The work superimposes the human psyche (our desires, fears, and superficialities) onto our inorganic landscapes. The sound is a complex amalgamation of electronic, ambient, and experimental music sampled and mixed by Joe Monteleone.
"Back of Head ק"
(2016) 5 min
A petit aside that alludes to the seventeenth tarot card, The Moon, exploring pull and tendency both conceptually and phycically.
"Corporate Gamer" (2014) 6 min
Corporate.Gamer animates unfortunately mundane day jobs. A trio engages in robotic, inorganic and task oriented vocabulary, personify a 9-5 schedule through suggestive images and dynamic partnering.
"I Like When My Defense Mechanism Gets Along With Your Defense Mechanism" (2015)
8 min
A nervous system . . .
A solo always in flux . . .
A political and psychological manifesto . . .
The First in a trilogy . . .
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"Sterilty"
(2015) 3 Hours
2 bodies in an all white space sterilize for the entirety of the event.