John Toenjes
Associate Professor, Music Director
John Toenjes is Associate Professor and Music Director of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Department of Dance, Technical Director for the Illinois-Japan Performing Arts Network (IJPAN), and former president of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance. He has written more than 30 commissioned dance scores for such choreographers as Lucas Hoving, Joe Goode, and Luc Vanier. His collaboration with choreographer Joe Goode, The Ascension of Big Linda into the Skies of Montana, earned the SF Bay Area “Izzy” Award for Best Production of 1986. Other collaborations include Value Intensity with choreographer Todd Williams, which was the opening concert of the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival in New York in February 2006, and e’s of water, with choreographer Luc Vanier, a large-scale interactive dance and sonic sculpture installation in June 2007 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. With artistic partners David Marchant and Ben Smith, he creates computer-assisted interactive dances, most notably Inventions Suite, featured at the 2008 Cleveland Ingenuity Festival. In the fall of 2010, John was invited to an artist residency at STEIM, in Amsterdam. Shortly thereafter, he redesigned the electronics and wrote a new sound score for Trisha Brown’s Astral Convertible (Reimagined), and in 2011programmed the interactive dance fraMESHift for the Virtual Reality and Multimedia Park, in Turin, Italy. John teaches courses in Music for Dance and Internet Performance at UIUC, and coordinates Japanese-American theater and dance Internet cultural exchanges for IJPAN. His article “Composing for Interactive Dance: Paradigms for Perception,” was published in Perspectives of New Music in Winter 2007, and he wrote a chapter about improvisation in the modern dance class for the book Musical Improvisation: Art, Education and Society, published by UofI Press
