Jo Pollitt is a dancer, choreographer and writer whose practice is grounded in performance improvisation and creative arts research. As the director of the response project, initiated in 2000, Jo works with performers as authorities in revealing traces of lived experience and physical imagination. Her response work is focused on the development of improvisation as a performance form and on the integration of embodied methods for writing like dancing through an investigation of timing, structure and disruption on the continuum of creative process.
Jo holds an MA in Creative Arts and has worked with various companies and artists including Tasdance, STRUT, Jennifer Monson (Syd/Melb/New York) and Rosalind Crisp (Perth, Berlin, Sydney). Jo was co-director of the 1999 Hobart Fringe Festival and was dance curator of Boiler Room—a national improvisation festival in 2002/03.
Her choreographed works include Room; Re-render for Chrissie Parrott; Check Point Solo for Rhiannon Newton performed at Judson Church, New York and Under the Radar Festival, Brisbane; the Beast trilogy with Paea Leach and Divided. She has created work by commission for PICA, LINK dance company and KATH—The Sydney Opera House, and she has been published in journals and magazines, led multiple workshops on writing for dancers, and written several dance scripts. She is an Australian Dance Awards panellist and honorary life member of Artrage.
Jo lectures in improvisation at WAAPA, works as a dramaturg and mentor for artists nationally, reviews for The West Australian, fronts the writing/dancing project co-works with Paea Leach and is the co-creative director of both BIG Kids Magazine and the Mother Artist Network. 2015 sees her embarking on her PhD with the working title ‘Attention, Momentum and Compression: A danced document of embodied fiction’.