Overview
Jim Self, an Alabama native, works in painting, performance, writing, and installation. In 1972, his dancing career began in high school and continued immediately after with the Chicago Dance Troupe, where he performed and first taught dance at Columbia College/Chicago. An original founder of MOMING Performance Collection in 1974, he later started Self Performing ARTs, Inc. with the support of a 1975 National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer’s grant.
Moving to NYC in 1976, he joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company debuting in the company’s landmark season at Broadway’s Minskoff Theater on Times Square. During the 1980’s, he choreographed and performed with Robert Wilson / Byrd Hoffman School for Byrds, founded the touring company Jim Self and Dancers, and with Frank Moore won a 1985 ‘Bessie Award' for BEEHIVE, a film and ballet depicting the stories of a worker bee and a drone, and their animated/ cartooned/ mutated / inter-species life. The Moore/Self collaborations, declared “unlike anything of their generation” by the NY Times, continued throughout the 1980’s with final presentations at Cornell in 1990/91. In her 2004 review of “East Village USA”, at The New Museum, NY Times art critic, Roberta Smith called The Beehive Film, “an East Village classic.” The film has been shown internationally at venues including NYC’s Public Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Film Forum, The New Museum, Museum of Modern Art, NYU/Fales Collection, Institute of Contemporary Art/ Philadelphia, Skidmore’s Tang Museum/ Saratoga, and Paris’s Cinémathèque Francaise with a sponsored tour of European and Asian venues.
Self, described as a “post-modern bad boy” and a “uniquely eccentric artist,” by the Village Voice has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, NYS Council on the Arts, NY Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Art Matters, National Choreography Project, and Tompkins County Arts Partnership, among many others. His work has been commissioned by the Boston Ballet, the Rome Opera Ballet, American Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, the Serious Fun! Festival, Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers/France, WerkCentrumDans/Rotterdam, Sundance Institute/Ballet West, Cornell University, and Primary Performance Group. Self is featured in the dance films: Retracing Steps by Michael Blackwood; In Artificial Light by Curt Royston; Locale by Merce Cunningham, and Alabama Public Television’s Jim Self Comes Home. Additionally, Self’s work has been performed at the Tate Museum/London, the Whitney Museum, and he received a ‘University of Alabama Arts Award,’ in part for the Alabama Trilogy dance project.
A member of the dance faculty at Cornell University from 1989- 2014, he taught movement explorations, post-modern dance technique, dance history, performance improvisation, and the history of Hip Hop dance culture. In 1996 he graduated Summa Cum Laude (Cornell ’96), receiving a BA in ‘Ritual and Performance.’ During this period he created Dancing Iguana Consciousness, Dada ART Barking, Booda Fairyism, and staged the first gay wedding ceremony at NYC’s Lincoln Center (Getting Married—1990). But perhaps most significantly, he created a series of healing rituals directed by the ‘channeled' animal spirit goddess and shamanatrix, Ramona Wolf. Sanctuary: Ramona and the Wolfgang Work for a Cure was chronicled in David Gere’s book, “How to Make Dances in an Epidemic.” Self’s work from the 1970’s through the 1990’s has been detailed in Sally Bane’s book, “Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism.”
Since 2007, Self has been a member of The New York State DanceForce, a NYSCA Partner. A consortium of artists, presenters and activists, DanceForce Projects have included: Ithaca LoveShoe Festival, Dancing Greens, Figures in the Field, and since 2021, JUNE DANCE at The Cherry, in Ithaca NY.
From 2012 – 2014, Self maintained a studio in Los Angeles at 1019 WEST Arts Complex where he created The Prometheus Project and its accompanying ‘Promethean Replication Theories,’ as well as Scene From Above, a rooftop performance project for planes approaching LAX airport.
Self continues living and working in upstate New York, organizing community projects and generating an ongoing series of performed memoirs.
Selected Books/Articles/Web
Banes, Sally- Writing Dancing in the age of Post-Modernism, 1994 (subject of articles)
Gere, David—How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS, 1994 (subject of book chapter)
Community Arts Partnership/Tompkins Co./–
https://artspartner.org/content/view/Artist-Features.html April 2022 (Featured Artist interview)
Website: Jimboself.com
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jimboself/videos