HIJACK

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?”

Van Loon and Wilder each grew up in Chicago, met at Colorado College, and established their collaboration in Minneapolis in 1993. HIJACK’s roots in a liberal arts setting isolated in the mountains laid the foundation for experimentation, invention without precedent, and making dance out of everything but dance. Their teaching is fueled by their choreographic research as well as ongoing study and collaboration with improvisation/contact improvisation inventors and innovators including Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton, Jennifer Monson, Karen Nelson and others. HIJACK teaches Contact Improvisation and Composition at the University of MN and Zenon and hosts/curates FUTURE INTERSTATES—the sporadic series for dance improvisation performance.

Over the last 27 years they have created over 100 dances and performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal. 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. 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”. HIJACK questions where and for whom contemporary dance is performed, gigging regularly in both social settings and concert settings.

Frequent visits to Seattle have included teaching and gigging at Velocity (SCUBA Touring Network), Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (SFDI) and Northwest Film Forum.