Studio Stories: Reminiscing on Twin Cities Dance with Hijack/Kristin Van Loon + Arwen Wilder Season 2 Episode 32

HIJACK is the Minneapolis-based choreographic collaboration of
Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. HIJACK is the confluence and
clash of two independent compositional/kinesthetic impulses.
Their dances embrace juxtaposition. Their dances house unlikely
intimates and question “who is the enemy?” 


Specializing in the inappropriate, HIJACK is best known for
"short-shorts:" pop song-length miniatures designed to deliver a
sharp shock.


Over the last 25 years they have created over 100 dances and
performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal.
HIJACK manipulates context by employing a site-specific approach
to every performance and toying with audiences' expectations.
HIJACK has performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter,
Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate
Factory), Japan, Russia, Central America, Ottawa, Chicago,
Colorado, New Orleans, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, at
Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in
Maine and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. HIJACK
questions where and for whom contemporary dance is performed,
gigging regularly in both social settings and concert settings.
 


HIJACK has enjoyed long relationships with Red Eye Collaborations
(as part of their Critical Core), Bryant Lake Bowl Theater where
their 1996 "Take Me To Cuba" was the theater’s first ever dance
concert), Zenon Dance School (where they have taught every
Wednesday morning for 18 years), and Walker Art Center where they
have performed in every imaginable context including the opening
of the McGuire Theater, at Dyke Night, First Free Saturday
children’s programming, in the sculpture garden, and in the light
of the Benson Film Collection in the Mediateque. In 2013, Walker
Art Center commissioned “redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red
Eye” to celebrate twenty years of HIJACK and Contact Quarterly
published the chapbook “Passing for Dance: A HIJACK Reader”.


Their 2018-20 projects include: performing End Plays with Lisa
Nelson, curating and hosting Future Interstates (a series of
dance improvisation performances initiated by HIJACK and Body
Cartography in 2015), creation and premiere of Jealousy (a
collaboration with sculptor Ryan Fontaine and lighting designer
Heidi Eckwall at Hair + Nails Gallery), touring an evening of
dance with films to micro-cinemas and managing & dancing in
the 2019 McKnight International Choreography residency of Galia
Eibenshutz at Cedar Cultural Center.