Honoring Morgan Jennesse: My Dinner with Morgan at Remedy Diner #44

Join us for an evening commemorating the late Morgan Jenness, whose passing on November 12, 2024, left an indelible mark on the worlds of theater and dramaturgy.

Chapter 44 of My Dinner with Morgan at Remedy Diner — a title inspired by the film My Dinner with Andre — honors Jenness's spirit and ideas through performance, conversation, and reflection. November 13th marks a year after her passing. With Yoshiko Chuma, Melissa Flower-Gladney, and Timothy Buckley. Followed by a panel, moderated by Frank Hentschker

About the project: Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks have been a part of New York’s downtown theatre scene since the 1970s. The work resists definition as one that layers visuality, movement, text, media, props, memory, history, and violence. For over a year, Chuma and Jenness met weekly to discuss dramaturgy and began developing a new project.

 Throughout the past year, The School of Hard Knocks has delved into the ideas of dramaturgy, playwriting, history, and memory that Morgan so generously shared. This event gathers those explorations into an evening that may unfold as discussion, performance, or a mix of both —a true manifestation of the company’s collaborative brain and evolving practice. Jenness, who nurtured the work of countless playwrights, once joked that she had “committed many acts of dramaturgy and had not been arrested yet.” Chuma recalls attending a party where tables were full of chocolate—Morgan ate all the chocolate. “Food is something you cannot bring back,” Chuma says, a phrase that lingers like an image of Morgan’s spirit: full, direct, unrepeatable. The School of Hard Knocks continues to practice its art—at times military and/or childlike—in a world that still feels perilous, yet charged with imagination.

 When Chuma and Melissa Flower-Gladney first began working together, Flower-Gladney was researching Japanese gymnastics for a course paper here at the Graduate Center. Yoshiko knew all of the movements. This is how Flower-Gladney became part of the School of Hard Knocks, joining weekly discussions on Zoom with Morgan Jenness and other artists from all over the world. Jenness was slated to perform as a part of the company in December last year, but before her debut, she passed away. Melissa Flower-Gladney was then placed in the performance. Since that moment, Chuma has been performing 43 iterations of My Dinner with Morgan at Remedy Diner, some as discussions in homes, some as performances with dancers and musicians onstage, some in galleries, and some in diners.  

Yoshiko Chuma, born in Osaka, Japan, arrived 1976 in New York City and made lower Manhattan — then a so-called dangerous place — her home and studio, beginning a career that has spanned more than 45 years and over 100 productions, commissions, and site-specific works. Chuma constantly challenges the notion of performance for both audience and participant, crossing physical and metaphorical borders, often placing herself “in danger’s way” for the sake of art. What is forbidden to some becomes, for her, a center of creation. She confuses documentation with history, reconstructing fragments of past events and transforming them into the present. Having received no formal dance training, Chuma’s methods are spontaneous, intuitive, and experimental. Her process often begins with an abstract image—once, a crumpled piece of paper she handed to her collaborators, asking them to embody its texture and tension. Her performances resist definition and confound interpretation; they stand outside the genealogy of dance and inside the boundless field of lived experience. Since founding The School of Hard Knocks in 1980, Chuma has collaborated with more than 2,000 artists, thinkers, and visionaries worldwide.

Melissa Flower-Gladney is currently a Level II PhD student in Theatre and Performance at City University of New York. Her research centers around physical culture, citizenship, maternity, and alternative pedagogies. Before she was at CUNY she worked as a theatre director, performance artist, and dramaturg. Melissa’s key devised works include Pangea at BLUEorange Gallery, Memory in the Time of the Refugee at Dixon Place, things missing/missed at Undermain Theatre, and Transitions at Mason Gross Gallery. She trained with SITI Company throughout her career as well as at SCOT in Toga, Japan. Her publications include “Field Notes from the SITI Summer Workshop” in TDR (September 2024) and a chapter in (M)Other Perspectives: Staging Motherhood in 21st Century North American Theatre & Performance (2023). She has acted as assistant literary manager at the Alley Theatre and as a research assistant to Dr. Richard Schechner. She is a member of Yoshiko Chuma’s School of Hard Knocks. Melissa currently works as an editorial assistant at The Drama Review and for Puppetry Research International. 

Angelina Laguna, (b. 2001), is an independent dancer and performance artist working in New York City. Laguna maintains physical practices of ballet, Cunningham technique, and the classical Pilates method. Additionally, she is involved with the Cabrini Immigrant Services Food Pantry, working in manual labor and fundraising, and with various anti-war groups across the city. These practices shape her performances. Laguna has worked for and alongside renowned choreographers, visual artists, musicians, activists, lawyers, and table tennis champions, among other New York professionals and residents. She performs in studios, on stages, and on sidewalks.

Timothy Buckley's artistic practice has always been about making systems visible. In the 1980s, he created a substantial body of work across the US and throughout Europe—from The Kitchen and Dance Theatre Workshop to venues in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Austria, and the UK developing a choreographic approach that made visible the mechanics of performance itself. Buckley embraced a virtuosity that made physical diMiculty visible rather than transcendent. Critics noted his ability to "deliberately bumble and careen with virtuosity"—a mastery of controlled chaos, where dancers revealed eMort, collision, and the messy mechanics of movement itself. His meta-theatrical works created "the illusion of spontaneity" through rigorously constructed chaos—pieces where the system was made visible. This earned him a 1984 Bessie Award and international recognition. Works like "A Letter to Diaghilev," his exploration of Nijinsky's genius and madness, revealed another fascination: the space between control and release, where system meets impulse. When the internet emerged in the mid-1990s, Buckley recognized another system to choreograph. IBM's recruitment in 2000 wasn't him leaving dance behind but a logical extension—applying the same spatial intelligence to organizing information flow across global digital networks.