A Year Without Bodies in Peripheries Journal

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A Year Without Bodies in Peripheries Journal

When I watch Okwui cry and then Ralph and Okwui dancing.I slip into their bodies, that way Okwui drops her weight to make her knees give out, the way Ralph can open the space between his shoulder and ear to know where he is. I remember being a dancer.

—A Year Without Bodies, Okwui || Spring

Published in Peripheries Journal, No. 6 (2023) , edited by Sherah Bloor. Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions.

https://www.peripheriesjournal.com/new-issues

Old Injuries and Lost Loves: Modern Garage Movement 2005-2011

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Old Injuries and Lost Loves: Modern Garage Movement 2005-2011

A review of the book Modern Garage Movement 2005-2011, ed. Biba Bell in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

https://direct.mit.edu/pajj/article-abstract/45/3%20(135)/122/117351/Old-Injuries-and-Lost-Loves

The Modern Garage Movement rolled in, in a swirl of rough glamor, un-moneyed generosity, and enough dancing to spill over the edges of every space they inhabited. They trusted their audience to carry the meaning of their dances and to keep them aline. They didn’t pull out cameras to capture every moment. They didn’t look back. They were busy dancing.

For Abigail, For Simon

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For Abigail, For Simon

Co-authored with Simon Leung. Published in Movement Research Performance Journal. Issue 57: Work

https://movementresearch.org/publications/performance-journal/issue-57

The body at work, long-practiced and sure in its skill, speaking about living in the world, about commitment, purpose, humor, error, and shared effort, which is love.

Redactions No. 9: A Fragile Thing

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Redactions No. 9: A Fragile Thing

Published in Imagined Theaters (Vol. 3: Open). Daniel Sack, ed.

“The soft-voiced man played a piece of music twice, played by a father and daughter. Vienna 1929. There is a punchline. Both are Jews + the daughter dies in Auschwitz running the orchestra for the camp. But part of his point is that we shouldn’t, or at least don’t have to listen to the piece thinking of it as an inevitable march to their end. We might hear it as they did in ‘29 with no sense (no sense?) of that was to come.”

How We Remember: Judson Dance Theater at the Museum of Modern Art→

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How We Remember: Judson Dance Theater at the Museum of Modern Art

Published in PAJ (MIT Press)

The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done is centrally an invocation of the zeitgeist of that historical moment and the artists who helped shape it. Written into the show’s title as well as the curation as a whole, the exhibition’s implicit inquiry is: how do we look back from where we are; what does that time tell us about our times? And for those who accept the invitation: what might the creative action of that fertile and contentious era ask us of being and acting in our own? Full text

Séanced—American Realness 2018→

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Séanced—American Realness 2018

See me, feel me, do not be sure you understand me…

Is it our role, then, to respond to Kosoko about the work? No. This, too, he has taken into his own hands. At each performance, he has selected an “intellectual medium” to riff with him on the themes, and to ground the dream-logic, of his work. Each invitee is a Black artist, in the two performances I saw, Okwui Okpokwasili and M. Lamar. These conversations model an engagement with Kosoko and his world and point us toward ideas and interpretations we might or might not notice on our own. They absolve those of us in the audience—or take from us the privilege—of being the sole live interpreters of the work.

Critical Correspondence: Dance and the Museum→

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Critical Correspondence: Dance and the Museum

In 2013, Critical Correspondence initiated a project dedicated to the examination of dance in the museum today–its politics, economics, and aesthetics. Acknowledging a long history of cross-pollination between dance and the visual arts–some driven by artists, some by institutions–our hope is to create a forum, based in a dance institution, for the voices of those affected by and invested in these issues.

Dance and the Museum was conceived and curated by Nicole Daunic and Abigail Levine.

Interview with artist Janine Antoni→

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Interview with artist Janine Antoni

Antoni describes herself as new to dance, although her artistic practice has always centered on the body. Movement improvisation, she says, acts as an accelerator of her artistic process; when she dances, she can bring herself to a state of presence and creativity that she had usually had to wait to arrive in bursts between longer stretches of more intellectualized investigation. 

Interview with Lise Soskolne of W.A.G.E.→

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Interview with Lise Soskolne of W.A.G.E.

This past winter I met with Lise Soskolne, core organizer for W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy). W.A.G.E. is “a New York-based activist organization focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions, and establishing a sustainable labor relation between artists and the institutions that subcontract their labor.” I got to know Lise and the work of W.A.G.E. as I was negotiating the complications of working in a museum as a performer. We spoke about the evolution and current work of W.A.G.E., as well as specifically considering the work of performance artists and hired performers within the context of exhibitions and performances. W.A.G.E.’s website is a clearinghouse of resources on the economic and political conditions of professionalized art-making.

Interview with curator Charles Aubin→

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Interview with curator Charles Aubin

Curator and performance scholar Charles Aubin discusses his work at Paris’s Centre Pompidou and New York’s Performa Biennial, focusing on the current interest in live art and performing arts curation. Aubin addresses the differences in curatorial strategies in a yearlong programming calendar versus a biennial, the funding structures in Europe versus the U.S. and the attendant challenges, as well as the the artistic cross-pollination he is interested in fostering between international artists and audiences.

Being a thing: the work of performing in the museum→

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Being a thing: the work of performing in the museum

Published in Women & Performance (Routledge)

As many critics and scholars have noted, museums are ushering performance back into their galleries at a furious pace. Some speak of the trend with an oddly literal metaphor – performance as new life to reanimate culturally and economically dead spaces. Roberta Smith writes of the Whitney Biennial: “The 2012 incarnation is a new and exhilarating species ... an emerging curatorial life form, at least for New York” (Smith 2012, The New York Times). Although rarely acknowledged, on a more fundamental level, the new“species” entering the museums is not a “curatorial life form” but the performer, the artist who is an interpreter rather than a creator of a live work. Full text

Marina Abramovic's Time→

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Marina Abramovic's Time

Excerpted in Memory: Documents in Contemporary Art (MIT Press)

Published in e-misférica

More than 750,000 viewers visited the MoMA exhibition and many more followed Abramović’s performance via a real-time webfeed. The show garnered a storm of critical and popular media coverage, including process pieces about inappropriate touching of the human art, and the New York Post’s coyly titled “Squeezy Does It.” This show played on a huge scale, and its organizers were obviously invested in “telling the story” of Abramović’s career clearly and dramatically. This required a simple narrative of her career that, in some ways, undermined the radical experience of Abramović's performed time.

Performance by Diana Taylor (translated from Spanish by Abigail Levine)→

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Performance by Diana Taylor (translated from Spanish by Abigail Levine)

"Performance" has multiple and often overlapping meanings that signify a wide variety of social behaviors. In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores many of its uses and iterations: artistic, economic, sexual, political, and technological performance; the performance of everyday life; and the gendered, sexed, and racialized performance of bodies. This book performs its argument. Images and texts interact to show how performance is at once a creative act, a means to comprehend power, a method of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.