Jacob Jonas’ hashtag dance His innovative company comes to the Lensic
Instagram. Branding. Media influencers. It’s a brave new world out there for artists. Figuring out how to harness the powers of social media to build an audience for a low-tech art form like dance is no mean trick. But Jacob Jonas, an LA-based twenty-six-yearold dancer, choreographer, photographer, and director, moves easily in these worlds. His four-year-old company is showing the dance world what its future might look like by combining the popular forms of street dance and acrobatics and juxtaposing them with ballet and modern dance. Jonas also dreamed up the #CamerasandDancers project on Instagram, which has attracted thousands of followers. The digital results of this project — still images capturing moments in time and space involving amazing dancers — have clearly aided Jonas’ rise, at such an early age, to national prominence. The Jacob Jonas Dance Company will appear at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Thursday, May 3. “I have street dancers and ballet-trained dancers,” he said. “I pair the two different kinds of dancers together and explore new movement.” As a dancer, Jonas is fluent in all these forms. He performed with a group called the Calypso Tumblers after learning his breakdance chops with them on the streets of Venice, California, at thirteen. “We would put together shows and perform them on the boardwalk near the beach,” he said. “The older dancers didn’t have any tolerance for excuses. I learned discipline and a strong work ethic.” At sixteen, he was offered the opportunity to teach his street moves at a local dance school in exchange for classes in ballet and jazz. It was eye-opening. “In breakdance, you would see a move and then go home and practice it for a couple of days. In ballet, it took me three years before I felt I understood how to move at all. I knew I wanted to learn ballet, to add it to my vocabulary as an artist.”
Jonas’ other work includes freelance gigs as a TV-commercial director and photographer, shooting still photos for fashion campaigns. These days he has developed a new niche as a “choreographer” for the camera; he is hired to decide how camera shots should “move” during music videos and commercials.
The #CamerasandDancers project is a fusion of both his professions. He approached museums and cultural organizations whose buildings featured striking architecture, like the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Whitney and Metropolitan museums in New York, the old barnstudios at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Seattle Library, and the Complexe Sportif de Saint-Laurent in Montreal. Using this architecture as background, a hand-selected group of photographers worked with a group of dancers in each location to create images. “It was a way of meeting like-minded people,” he said. It was also a creative challenge. “You can never go to a location and know what is going to happen.”
The participating dancers included not only members of the Jonas Company but also dancers from Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Pilobolus, New York City Ballet, Bodytraffic, and The Royal Ballet. The photographers chosen were those with a strong Instagram presence — like Ravi Vora, who has 854,000 followers, or Pei Ketron, with 795,000. The events are called InstaMeets, and there have been 40 of these so far. “There has never been a dollar exchanged during these events,” Jonas said. The point was the photographs, and the exposure, for everyone involved. #CamerasandDancers is proving to be a great platform to inspire new artistic collaborations, build community, and increase visibility of the art of dance, Jonas said. The photos also serve to make dance accessible to a younger demographic.
Of course, a dance company can’t survive solely on the internet. And in concert, there is the challenge of time, space, and choreography. “A photo is an isolated moment in time. A dance is a totally different challenge — how to sustain an idea over 45 minutes,” he said. “My dances combine my life experience, what I obsess about, and how I want to express my ideas to the world. I have a narrative drive.”
Jonas never went to college, danced with a company, or took a choreography workshop. He is self-taught, using street smarts, a real-world aesthetic, experimentation, and innovation to create dances. However, when his goals as a choreographer became evident, Jonas did seek out a mentor. Donald Byrd, Tony-award nominated choreographer for The Color Purple, artistic director of Spectrum Dance Company in Seattle, winner of a Kennedy Center award for choreography, and selfdescribed “citizen-artist,” offered him a three-month internship, which turned out to be a crash course in everything from how to choreograph to how to run a nonprofit.
In 2017, Jonas inaugurated “To the Sea,” an outdoor dance festival held on Santa Monica Pier that recently finished its second season. This year, he was named one of “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine. “When Jacob Jonas The Company performs, energy doesn’t just seem to bounce off the walls, it reverberates off of bodies,” wrote a critic in the Los Angeles Times after a 2016 performance. “If break dancing and concert dance had a baby, it would be the Jacob Jonas company. With balletic arabesques, acrobatic flips, and spinning headstands, the dancers showed that they could hold their own in the studio and on the street.”
The performance in Santa Fe will feature 10 dancers and four pieces (one of which is a film), all choreographed by Jonas. “In a Room on Broad Street,” from 2014, explores a theme of competition. “It’s about the sprint against time,” Jonas said. “One Pair Off,” from 2017, features three street dancers and one ballet dancer. “I was playing with symmetrical designs and duet moments with the ballet dancer and the three others.” The film, “Grey,” with cinematography by William Adashek, was shot at the Getty Museum, and features music by Trent Reznor, founder of the industrial rock project Nine Inch Nails. “Obstacles,” a duet featuring Jonas and Marissa Labog, is dedicated to Mallory Smith, a friend of the choreographer who suffered from cystic fibrosis and passed away in 2017.
Asked how many apps he has on his phone, and which he would recommend to dance fans, Jonas said, “The only app I use is Instagram. It’s visual literacy. I don’t need anything else.”