John Toenjes

Biography

John Toenjes is a professor and the undergraduate director of Dance at Illinois and past president of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance. Works include the evening-length interactive music/dance piece Inventions Suite, performed at the 2008 Cleveland Ingenuity Festival, and e’s of water, a dance/computer installation at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2007. John wrote the score and designed the wireless sensor networks used in Trisha Brown’s Astral Convertible (Re-imagined) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in February 2010. In 2011-12, John wrote the music for and designed the computer systems used in FraMESHift, produced at Teatro Astra in Turin, Italy. For three years, he served as the technical director for IJPAN, the Illinois-Japan Performing Arts Network, overseeing online broadcasts that culminated in his own performance Timings: An Internet Dance with dancers in three locations, including Tokyo, connected to live avatars via Kinect. His 2014 interactive dance work, Kama Begata Nihilum, featured a cast of dancers carrying networked iPads and an audience AR app that augmented the stage action. This inspired him to establish LAIT, the Laboratory for Audience Interactive Technologies, which is designing a platform for the easy creation of audience apps to be used in the theatre. Currently John is working on a dance theatre work entitled Public Figure, premiering at the University of California-Irvine in 2015, which will be the first theatrical work to integrate LAIT into its development process.