Jason Torres Hancock

HAN_0028 copy Jason Torres Hancock is a performing artist with a background as an actor both in the United States and in England and has performed as a dancer in ballet and modern dance. Jason was also a founding member of the queer, multi-racial, multi-disciplinary performance company Out/Rage (2003-2004) that dealt with issues of race and racism in the gay male community in San Francisco. Since 2002, he has created dance/theatre works as a solo-artist and for his past performance collaborative, GROUP, focused on investigating the outsider experience shared by minority groups in American culture. GROUP was an AIRspace Artist-in-Residence at The Jon Sims Center in San Francisco in 2005 and was selected for encore performances in the National Queer Arts Festival in 2006.

In 2007, Jason collaborated with two local choreographers to produce an evening of dance called Shared Space at Dance Mission Theatre in San Francisco. He has also premiered solo-dance/theatre pieces at The Garage, SF, for the Move(men)t Festival, 2009, and at SOMArts for the This Is What I Want Festival, 2011, and at Cal State University East Bay’s Queer Dance Festival, 2012. In 2013, he was selected to perform an original work at the Fresh Fruit Festival in New York City.

Jason holds a BA in Drama from U.C. Irvine and studied a year abroad at the University of Warwick, England. He is a graduate of Naropa University’s Masters of Fine Arts in Theatre: Contemporary Performance, where he studied with guest artists from Tectonic Theatre Company and SITI Company. While in the Denver area Jason also performed with a Butoh company and with Butoh artist Katsura Kan.

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Now living in Chicago, Jason continues creating work and performing with local choreographers. He has performed with Victoria Bradford’s A House Unbuilt (HUB) and performed at D49 at Hamlin Park and Harvest Festival with choreographer Melinda Meyers. In 2013 Jason was the 1950’s Man in Josiah McElheny’s opening exhibit at The Arts Club of Chicago. In 2014, he presented a new work, SLAM, for The Chicago Home Theatre Festival and he also created a new improvisation-based dance piece to recordings of Gertrude Stein reading her poetry called If I Told Her: A Portrait for the Chicago Moving Company’s dance festival, D49, at Hamlin Park. If I Told Her: A Portrait, was described by the Chicago Tribune as “simultaneously funny and devastating” and was remounted at Pritzker Park as part of Chicago Dance Month in April 2015. Jason continues to create work exploring the outsider experience through the performative synthesis of the moving body with theatrical use of the voice, text, and objects. This is his first engagement with Erica Mott Productions.

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