John Matthew Toenjes has written more than 30 commissioned dance scores. 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. Recent 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; Leonardo’s Chimes with David Marchant, premiered at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (KCPA) in 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.

His latest interactive stage work, Songs of the Elastic Halloon, was premiered November 2007 at KCPA. John is an Assistant Professor and Music Director of the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2006, he won a Madden Fellowship in Technology and the Arts, and he spent that year making new works featuring interactive computer technology as it applies to movement-based arts. 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 Improvisation, published by UofI Press.

John wrote a new score for the dance Astral Convertible Reimagined, choreography by Trisha Brown, performed at UIUC in February 2010. In the fall of 2010, John was invited to an artist residency at STEIM, in Amsterdam, where he began work on a solo concert of computer-assisted interactive music. And in May 2011 produced the interactive electronics and wrote the music score for the dance fraMESHift, performed in Turin, Italy..