Studio Stories: Reminiscing on Twin Cities Dance with Paul Herwig and Jennifer Isle - Season 12, Episode 138

Paul Herwig has been working for over 40 years as a professional visual and performing artist. Paul is the founding Co-Artistic Director/Manager of Off-Leash Area, a dance and theater company creating original interdisciplinary performance work, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota USA, which is now in its 25th year, and has presented 30 original productions. Paul is a graduate of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq (1981-1983), and regularly performs lead and ensemble roles in the company’s productions, as well as having designed and built sets for all its 30 productions. Paul is a self-taught visual and digital artist, working in live animated projection art, and projection mapping.

 Paul has received many awards, including a McKnight Theater Fellowship, 5 MN State Arts Board individual artist grants, a Jerome Travel grant, among others. His set designs and performances have been listed in the Minneapolis press’ Best of the Year lists eighteen times since 2002. In 2019, Paul was chosen among a group of US designers to exhibit at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance and Design.

 Recently, Paul has been working in public art. Earlier this year he presented Facing the Fire (2), a public art project that wrapped the ruins of the former 3rd Police Precinct building with projections and sound. This building is located in the heart of the Minneapolis neighborhood where Paul has had a home for twenty years, and formerly housed the officers who murdered George Floyd, a traumatic event which set off an international movement for racial justice. Most recently, Paul was commissioned by the MN State Fair, and created Canopy/Calliope, a fantasia of carnival rides, farm animals, and musical instruments.

Jennifer Ilse grew up in rural northern Wisconsin, and first studied dance in a professional setting in Duluth, Minnesota. She then moved to Eugene, Oregon to continue her studies at the University of Oregon. In Eugene she also studied with the Eugene Ballet under Susan Zadoff of Ballet Russe, at the Musical Feet school of tap, and performed four seasons with the Dance Theatre of Oregon.

After moving to Minneapolis in 1997 she co-founded the dance/theater/visual art hybrid company Off-Leash Area, for which she has performed lead roles, choreographed and directed most of its 30 original full-length interdisciplinary productions. She was a City Pages Artist of the Year, has been featured on TPT’s MN Original, received 5 Arts Board Artist Initiative grants, was chosen among a group of local choreographers to participate in the NEFA RDDI Dance initiative, and her production work with OLA has garnered 2 Ivey Awards. 

Her work as a dance educator has included professional and pre-professional programs at Zenon and TU Dance, to children community education programs in Oregon and Minneapolis, and at studios throughout the Twin Cities.