ABOUT
Renata Sheppard’s kinetic drawings expand dance into a multi-dimensional experience that includes visual art, film and photography. The dancing body serves as a tool for design, the resulting charcoal drawings live as a “score” or “print." These visual artifacts are selected for framing, treated with a bespoke process which encapsulates the delicate paper behind resin. The choreography is driven by conceptual frameworks that lend themselves to visual representation. It began with a fascination of procedural algorithms and "if/then" sequencing and has expanded to include the exploration of patterns and motifs such as the flower of life, decision theory and mathematical structures such as fibonacci’s sequence. Her practice allows dance to transcend its ephemeral nature and become concrete as visual art while exploring themes, concepts and states that reflect her inner world or observations of culture, people and place.
Pictured: Cinettica Fashion, Art & Film Festival Mexico (2021), "Patina" University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2019), "Perfect Broken" Balletto Teatro di Torino (2018), and various additional performances in Los Angeles (CA), Cape Charles (VA)
BIO
Some career highlights include presenting "Frameshift", an evening-length interactive dance created with Italy’s Allied Sciences Arts Lab and presented at the Teatro a Corte Festival in Torino. Another evening length work "Perfect Broken" created for Balletto Teatro di Torino which opened their season and was featured in Rivolimusica Festival. Her hand-made, illuminated wearable paper sculptures are featured in a hotel’s curated art collection and various magazine and photoshoots. She is also a passionate educator and has served in academia from gifted high school programs to graduate level courses she co-designed. She has presented her work and research internationally in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, Tunisia, India, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Canada, and throughout the US. She has been invited for choreographic residencies, guest lectures and academic positions including Musrara Festival in Jerusalem, New School of Media in New York, Culture Hub NYC, Bogliasco Foundation Italy, DanceBridge Chicago, Links Hall Chicago, Dance Omi, Summer Stages Dance, Planet Arts Exchange in Liverpool, Kolkata, and Tunisia, Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, Taiwan National University of the Arts, Seoul Institute of the Arts and European Video Dance Heritage project in Spain at the Reina Sofia Museum.
Renata is currently based in New York City, having lived and worked in the US, Europe, and Asia. Recognized for her innovative engagement of dance across discipline as a performer, creator and academic, she has been recognized as a Fulbright Scholar, Henry Luce Scholar, Kate Neal Kinley Fellow, and US Embassy Artist Research grantee with multiple awards for leadership in the arts and invited residencies and positions as dancer, choreographer and educator. Renata’s performance drawings thread together dance, film and her practice as a visual artist. Her work invites the audience to experience the process, absorbing both the ephemeral and permanent aspects of her creation, an intentionally designed experience driven by her interests in somatics, engagement and expanding notions of performance. Her kinetic drawings are dimensional art works: an amalgamation of the music that supported its creation, the gradual patina of charcoal that slowly emerges on the skin of her body, and the choreography that produces the emerging visual artifact from which an excerpt is selected and framed. Dance becomes visual art and visual art that is rooted in movement.
Career highlights include "Frameshift", an evening-length interactive dance created with Italy’s Allied Sciences Arts Lab and presented at the Teatro a Corte Festival in Torino; evening length "Perfect Broken" created for Balletto Teatro di Torino which opened their season and was featured in Rivolimusica Festival; and the commissioned work "Komorebi", two hand-made, illuminated wearable paper sculptures featured in Bruce Thomas' curated art collection at The Main (Norfolk, Va). She has presented her work and research internationally in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, Tunisia, India, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Canada, and throughout the US. She has been invited for choreographic residencies, guest lectures and academic positions including Musrara Festival in Jerusalem, New School of Media in New York, Culture Hub NYC, Bogliasco Foundation Italy, DanceBridge Chicago, Links Hall Chicago, Dance Omi, Summer Stages Dance, Planet Arts Exchange in Liverpool, Kolkata, and Tunisia, Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, Taiwan National University of the Arts, Seoul Institute of the Arts and European Video Dance Heritage project in Spain at the Reina Sofia Museum. She is a passionate educator, dance film specialist and the non-profit founder and director of GEAR/Films that Move, an award-winning artist residency and dance filmmaking experience where she has produced, facilitated and curated over 120 dance films. When she is not making kinetic drawings or sculpting wearables from paper, she works on various projects with Oscar-nominated filmmaker David Darg including the feature film "Arsonland" (coming in 2025).
I am not sure if I am a scientific artist or an artistic scientist, but the dialogue of function and expression, physiology and psychology, anatomy and spirituality are ever-present in my creative approach. I oscillate between the desire to design my art as an experiment, both for me and my audiences and the intuitive voice of expression that explodes once I lose myself in the movement. I don't consider this a conflict, but rather, a fascinating dialogue that forms my work and invites my audience into myriad ways of relating, and also, collaborating with me.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I want to reveal and extract the fragility of the artist, of our human experience, of the reasons we relate and fall in love with a work of art--with each other. Process and product in dialogue with each other to bring the audience into the full dimensionality of the work. Decisions, life, aging, beauty, perfection and the inevitable unraveling of all of the above.
In my work, the combination of film, photography, dance, music and visual art echo the structure of E.O. Wilson's "Consilience." Consilience is the a "jumping together of truths" which explores the ways that multiple disciplines lead to the same truth, in his case physics, mathematics, chemistry. The process and result of my kinetic drawings, reflect the essence of the human experience, manifested by the desire for structure while rules and form unravel and in their imperfect, smudged, and broken form become more interesting and beautiful.
I construct design motifs in my choreography, experimenting with crafted rules and tasks and juxtaposing them with the intuitive flow of non linear storytelling that comes with movement. My work is a dialogue between function and expression, physiology and psychology, anatomy and spirituality. I reject self-indulgent art that remains unnecessarily esoteric and exclusive. I embrace and strive to create art that invites the use of metaphor, is nurtured by questioning, invites curiosity and embodies research elements that can be articulated, even if their poetic or abstract nature. I want art that creates parallel worlds where the artist and audience can engage in conversations to better understand and observe the human condition.