Studio Stories: Reminiscing on Twin Cities Dance with Paul Herwig and Jennifer Isle - Season 12, Episode 138

Paul Herwig has been working for over 40 years as a
professional visual and performing artist. Paul is the founding
Co-Artistic Director/Manager of Off-Leash Area, a dance and
theater company creating original interdisciplinary performance
work, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota USA, which is now in its
25th year, and has presented 30 original productions. Paul is a
graduate of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq (1981-1983), and regularly
performs lead and ensemble roles in the company’s productions, as
well as having designed and built sets for all its 30
productions. Paul is a self-taught visual and digital artist,
working in live animated projection art, and projection mapping.


 Paul has received many awards, including a McKnight Theater
Fellowship, 5 MN State Arts Board individual artist grants, a
Jerome Travel grant, among others. His set designs and
performances have been listed in the Minneapolis press’ Best of
the Year lists eighteen times since 2002. In 2019, Paul was
chosen among a group of US designers to exhibit at the Prague
Quadrennial of Performance and Design.


 Recently, Paul has been working in public art. Earlier this
year he presented Facing the Fire (2), a public art project that
wrapped the ruins of the former 3rd Police Precinct building with
projections and sound. This building is located in the heart of
the Minneapolis neighborhood where Paul has had a home for twenty
years, and formerly housed the officers who murdered George
Floyd, a traumatic event which set off an international movement
for racial justice. Most recently, Paul was commissioned by the
MN State Fair, and created Canopy/Calliope, a fantasia of
carnival rides, farm animals, and musical instruments.



Jennifer Ilse grew up in rural northern Wisconsin, and
first studied dance in a professional setting in Duluth,
Minnesota. She then moved to Eugene, Oregon to continue her
studies at the University of Oregon. In Eugene she also studied
with the Eugene Ballet under Susan Zadoff of Ballet Russe, at the
Musical Feet school of tap, and performed four seasons with the
Dance Theatre of Oregon.


 


After moving to Minneapolis in 1997 she co-founded the
dance/theater/visual art hybrid company Off-Leash Area, for which
she has performed lead roles, choreographed and directed most of
its 30 original full-length interdisciplinary productions. She
was a City Pages Artist of the Year, has been featured on TPT’s
MN Original, received 5 Arts Board Artist Initiative grants, was
chosen among a group of local choreographers to participate in
the NEFA RDDI Dance initiative, and her production work with OLA
has garnered 2 Ivey Awards. 


 





Her work as a dance educator has included professional and
pre-professional programs at Zenon and TU Dance, to children
community education programs in Oregon and Minneapolis, and at
studios throughout the Twin Cities.