New & Noteworthy

2020 Events

Glenna and Jude offer FREE Human Origami JAMS each month at the American Dance Festival Community Studios, Main Street Durham. There’s no need to register. Just come along and join this dive into Glenna’s guided improvisation of folding patterns in Jude’s improvised sound surround. A deep entry into the mysteries and meaning of a fold.

NEXT JAM – Friday, April 24th, 4:30 – 6 pm

Human Origami Collaborations in Singapore

Maybe you’ve come across the word toile, meaning ‘canvas.’ A word particularly common among fashion designers, the toile is a kind of test garment – a bleached fabric that is cut out as a prototype, a sample garment – or ‘sketch’ – that previews the final garment.

In Human Origami, our improvisational movements are sketches, a palimpsest, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, as the exploring mover lays down a repeatable template. This sk-etch is a way of exploring movement in its purest form – unembellished, unedited, and free of the effort of achieving perfect performance. Similarly, a toile in fashion serves as a way for the viewer to see the general mock-up or outline of a garment, free of color, print, trims, or other features that might otherwise distract from apprehending the overall Gestalt of the design in its most raw form – a stunning example of aesthetic minimalism – matter and/as essence.

Earlier this year Human Origami co-creator Susan Sentler and fashion faculty at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore created an installation entitled ENFOLD. Here, fashion toiles mix with creative movement to generate a range of new dynamics which give rise to a new, minimalist expression. This topic of minimalism through the folding of fabric toiles, paper, and dancing bodies. From preparation to action, the toiles emerge from a mutually inspired collaboration, where both cutter and mover join in a reductionist dance. Catch a glimpse of Susan’s video clip of the Diploma 3 Fashion & Dance students performing their creations at the ArtScience Museum as part of the current exhibition on Minimalism, Space. Light. Object. Brava to fashion collaborators Ginette Chittick, Daniela Monasterios, Adrian Huang, Lim Poh Ning Paulin, the students, and Susan for their vision,

Human Origami is

An evolving STEAM network

STEAM stands for scientists, technology experts, engineers, artists and mathematicians – a trans-disciplinary network whose collaborations give rise to new art forms and scientific insights. Human Origami invites collaborations around the science and art of folding, offering new ways of envisioning and understanding the underlying aesthetic of life’s processes. Performing artists partner with bioengineers to fashion designers. The result? A new perspective on the aesthetics and logistics of human organization.

An embodied process of body-mind transformation.

Human Origami movement workshops explore how the body folds and unfolds in response to an enriched sensory environment of movement, music, language and multi-media that engage body, mind and ear – a liminal experience that transforms consciousness and catalyzes creativity in movement expression.

A window into human development –

Folding is the basic movement repertoire and an archive etched into the history of human development. Bio-Origami is how we got here, a continuum throughout the lifespan. Folding is how the embryo builds a body without a brain – a brilliance that speaks to the fundamentals of movement dynamics in the ecosystem of life.