How is dance labor valued? How has it been valued? How might it be? And how can we affect the value assigned to this labor? These questions will be considered across a spectrum of contexts, including individual and institutional, organized and spontaneous, and historical and anecdotal to explore how performance and dance function within our current artistic, economic and labor realities.
April 29 Dance and Labor Organized by luciana achugar, Abigail Levine and Kathy Westwater With panelists David Thomson and Yve Laris Cohen
April 28 7PM Open Performance Moderated by Mina Nishimura** Miriam Gabriel & Ian Kenselaar, Juliana Garber, Emma S. Kimball Eden’s Expressway, 537 Broadway, 4th Floor
Coming up next week…
May 4 8PM MR at Judson Church Yve Laris Cohen, Vanessa Justice, Mina Nishimura**, Vicky Shick***
Featuring works by Sarah White-Ayón, [ce n’est pas nous], Suzan D. Polat, Jessica Posner
Untitled work-in-progress
Conceived and directed by Sarah White-Ayón
Performed by Rebecca Wender, Kate Martel, Layla Childs and Sarah White-Ayón
Sound by Nancy Garcia with Music by Fugazi
Costumes by the performers with selections by Claire Fleury Atelier
Text written by Sarah White-Ayón and read by Sarah Heller
Untitled
Sculpture and Performance: Ferrán Martín
Performance: Priscilla Marrero
Sound: Adam Sipe
Ferrán Martín and Priscilla Marrero continue their research on the relationship between the body and the elements of architecture.
Talisman dance no. 4
Score, performance, and text by Suzan D. Polat
Music by Eliane Radigue
Butter Body Politic Presents: As the World Churns (Shake, Shake, Agitate)
Direction, Concept, and Objects: Jessica Posner
Performers: David Geer, Jessica Posner, Sahar Sephardi-Dalai
Technical Designer: Joanna Spitzner
Jessica Posner’s new work-in-progress, Butter Body Politic: As The World Churns (Shake, Shake, Agitate), presents three women agitating for a more delicious future. From teet to the tummy, they separate butter from whey with everything they’ve got, sculpting bodies present past future. Eat what she’s serving because it is good.
April 20 8PM MR at Judson Church [ce n’est pas nous], Suzan D. Polat, Jessica Posner, Sarah White-Ayón Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South
April 21 7PM Open Performance Moderated by Antonio Ramos* Naoko Maeshiba, Morinika, Jennifer Pommiss Eden’s Expressway, 537 Broadway, 4th Floor
Featuring works by Erin Ellen Kelly, Elisa Osborne, Johanna Meyer, Jeanine Durning
Seed
Concept and Performance: Erin Ellen Kelly
Soundscape with field recordings: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Max Richter
The starting point: the elemental qualities of landscapes. This improvisation explores water, frozen to steam. What characters emerge?
Thanks Juan Merchan, Ophra Wolf, Geoff Kuffner, Baptiste Ex, for lending an outside eye and feedback.
Gilded Kant A Vinyl Thinking Tank
Choreography by Elisa Osborne
Performed by: Elisa Osborne and Benjamin Bohnsack
Drawings: Benjamin Bohnsack
Coaching and Dramaturgy advice by: Karen Boesser www.karen-boesser-projects.com
Raincoat: a loan from the Vandenburgh family.
Special thanks to: Janet Panetta, Karen Boesser, Sonia Lopes Soares, Irene Dowd, Patricia Hoffbauer and Jörg Sommer at www.sommer-handel.de, and Christian Steinmetz at www.keyeffect.co
Hand-Made
By Johanna S. Meyer
Tonight’s performance is a work in progress started in the Liftoff Residency. This solo was made bringing different artists into the studio to direct my material. Later I will direct this material on performers and make a group piece. Currently Angelica Soledad, Paola Lopez and Nibia Pastrana Santiago have participated.
Jeanine Durning, with Julian Barnett and Molly Poerstel
“The pleasure is to our purpose, but the object is purposeless.” Immanuel Kant
“Keep on with the force don’t stop. Don’t stop ’til you get enough.” Michael Jackson
“Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on.” Samuel Beckett
From Jeanine: In the summer of 2013, I began a research into the practice of what I bluntly call nonstop moving. For the purposes of Judson tonight, Molly, Julian and I will be sharing and framing some of the tools and strategies of this practice, which normally lasts up to about an hour. Nonstop moving is in direct continuity to the practice of nonstop speaking that I began in 2008 and then started to publicly perform in 2010 as the work I call inging. The term nonstop is a decidedly chosen one, as opposed to perpetual or continual, because it points to the critical nature of what it takes to keep going in the midst of questions, doubts, and inevitable failures and limitations.Nonstopping accepts, as a practice, our multiplicity, our foibles, our repetitions, our desires, our potentialities, our perceptions, our paradoxes – all sitting up against each other, colliding and combining, tracing and erasing, creating and cleaving meaning.
Tune in to the MR Spring Festival online to follow blog postings by the curators and our team of festival writers, Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Willis. We have asked the writers to respond as artists, and as such welcome their unique vantages. Read along in real-time as each share their impressions of the various festival events. In casual blog form, these writings will be offered as open-ended dialogues.
~ the curators (Layla Childs, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Samita Sinha)
ABOUT THE WRITERS:
Jaime Shearn Coan is a writer and PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His writings on dance can be found frequently in The Brooklyn Rail. An inaugural Poets House Fellow and recipient of a 2014 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Jaime recently served as dramaturg for choreographer Mariangela López’s El Regreso. Jaime’s poetry chapbook, Turn it Over, from which he’ll be reading at The Poetry Project on May 22, is available from Argos Books.
Tara Aisha Willis is a dance artist and PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU. She is Co-Managing Editor of TDR/The Drama Review, an editorial collective member of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, co-editor of a forthcoming issue of The Black Scholar with Thomas F. DeFrantz, and a summer Thesis Writing Mentor for Hollins University Dance MFA’s. Her writing is forthcoming in Movement Research Performance Journal #46. Tara also coordinates Movement Research’s Artists of Color program.
Please note: Cassie Peterson was unable to write for the festival this year; Tara Willis stepped in!
Movement Research Studies Project, “being a body out loud”
Conceived by Ni’Ja Whitson Adebanjo, Edisa Weeks and Tara Aisha Willis
With panelists Allison Joy, Jumatau R. Poe and Social Health Performance Club
Living a body that shouts through the underbelly, a protested or protesting body, a black body, a body of the multitudes, a body of color, a body no one believes, a body of rage or exhaustion, a body on the ground outlined in chalk. Our current moment’s choreographies and vocabularies – gestures, chants, dances, collective actions – reveal (and disrupt) practices of living. What experiences do we hold in memory and body, and how do we hold them? With reverence? Power? Performers and writers responded with those in attendance.
Featuring works by Carlo Antonio Villanueva, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Ni’Ja Whitson Adebanjo, InTW
How to Dinkle, Bibbler, Shako, and Plume
Director: Carlo Antonio Villanueva
Performers: Juliana Ventimiglia, Miriam Gabriel, Carlo Antonio Villanueva
Music: John Luther Adams
leaves from a loose-leaf war diary
Choreographer and performer: Shayla-Vie Jenkins
Music: Sam Crawford
*Excerpt from the poem The Anniad, by Gwendolyn Brooks
**Thank you for lending me your voices: Shantelle, LaMont, Rena, Wendell, and Rachael.
When Water Dries the Mouth/New World Excerpt
Choreographer/Director: Ni’Ja Whitson Adebanjo with collaboration from the performers
Performers: The NWA Project – Kirsten Flores-Davis, Carrissa Matsushima, Ni’Ja Whitson Adebanjo
Music: “I Got the New World in My View”, Sister Gertrude Morgan and “Zion Zodu”, Nia Witherspoon
52 Hertz
Choreographer: Hsiao-Wei Hsieh, Hsiao-Ting Hsieh
Performers: Yuriko Hiroura, Marion Helfenstein, Yasmin LeBron-Savard, Shannon Elizabeth O’Brien, Zoe Warshaw,
Hsiao-Wei Hsieh.
Music: Waltz No.2 From Jazz Suite No.2 by Dimitri Shostakovich, Eternal Pulse by Hanan Townshend
April 6 8PM MR at Judson Church Ni’Ja Whitson Adebanjo**, InTW, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Carlo Antonio Villanueva Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South
