Projects
Listed below are a few notable projects within Lynette Kessler’s prolific career as dancer, dance media maker, and movement teacher.
Lynette is a rare dancing presence. Her body is a completely developed and mastered tool through which flows her creatively processed sensitivity to music, to sound, to space, to the environment as a whole. There is complete integrity in the experience she brings to us the audience. It is aesthetically nurturing, but, more than that, it seems to be almost pure being.
–Allegra Fuller Snyder
Professor Emerita of Dance UCLA, Co-founder, Buckminster Fuller Institute
PLACE WITH NO WORDS
A 30 minute solo performed on sculpture with projected CGI to simulate the internal movement process. John Wallis sculptor, Douglas Thompson editor, Amy Knoles composer. After 3 years of touring it was reworked into a 15-minute dance film and premiered at The Getty Center.
Kessler creates dreamy land of surge and drift...not only superbly supple but
remarkably prescient... Her concentration and mastery of positional nuance
stay engrossing but the work’s deepest moments come in her statements of
liquid, holistic integration: movement impulses rippling throughout her body
with no seams or points of tension to slow or block them.
–Lewis Segal, Los Angeles Times
SHE SAID
SHE SAID a dance media art piece that culminated from 10 years of experimental landscape dance film work. Filmed on the Green River in Southern Utah on a six day rafting trip.
Watching Lynette Kessler’s dance film, She Said gave me a vivid experience of the
connection between the human body and the natural environment. We hear about this
intellectually but rarely is it shown visually. This is profound and important work:
beautiful, inspiring and deep.
–Lara Owen, Author
ROCK FALL
ROCK FALL is one of several dance films in the HEADLANDS SERIES produced by Lynette Kessler during a three year artist residency program at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. Where the human form becomes an extension of the natural landscape.
Photo Credit Dino
Directed and choreographed a site specific duet for film with dancer Jean Sullivan (not shown) on a rocky ledge above the Pacific Ocean. Marsha Kahn cinematographer, Marilyn Weiss editor, Miquel Frasconi composer. Premiered on PBS and presented by New American Makers in San Francisco.
MOVEMENT WORKSHOPS & RITUAL
JUVENILE COURT COMMUNITY SCHOOL & LA THEATER WORKS
ARTS PROGRAM FOR INCARCERATED YOUTH
Provided weekly movement meditation class for high school aged young men using Continuum and Creative Movement. Goal was to practice healthful, creative, and soul nourishing ways to rebalance hormonal, emotional, and physical transitions. Developing internal awareness was the first step. Classes were in six week sessions and students often signed up to continue.
Laura Aguilar, Photographer (1959–2018)
I was impressed by the reactions of our students to Lynette Kessler's weekly movement program. The group of young men,14-17 years old in residence at the facility, was invariably respectful, cooperative and focused. They emitted a significantly different peaceful calm as they experienced movement meditation to connect mind and body. They quietly discussed the process with her instead of their usual clowning around which continued even as they moved out of the room. Other staff were also very impressed with the positive results and we often asked each other what is going on in there?! It's so quiet. The guys reported more calm, less stress, and better sleep –very important in a locked down residential facility.
Juvenile Court Community Schools, Los Angeles County Office of Education
EAST LOS ANGELES DANCE DAY
Over the years Lynette worked with the Los Angeles Unified School District for special Dance Days. Here 75 students are engaged in a Continuum and Creative Movement workshop. Other events included hundreds of students bussed to the Hammer Museum to see dance films on the big screen from the Dance Camera West festival collection.
Laura Aguilar, Photographer (1959–2018)
(GREAT) SUMMER SUN CIRCLE
Lynette Kessler guides a solstice movement ritual for 100 people on a grassy slope in Decker Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains of Malibu, California. Produced by Frankie Lee Slater and The Art of Living. From 1995 to 2000 Lynette facilitated movement rituals for full moon, equinox and solstice ceremonies for large groups in outdoor settings.
Lynette is a master teacher. She knows where every molecule of her body is and can transmit this information. I could feel her every movement and then more remarkably, my own. I looked around and everyone was moving. If the meaning of "sacred" is the sense of "awe" then what we did was Sacred and I felt healed.
Charles, movement ritual participant