Dance as an Act of Resistance: Feminist Magazine interview

Valecia Phillips, host of Feminist Magazine (KPFK 90.7FM), interviews me and interdisciplinary dance artist, educator and Avest Award winner taisha paggett on the role of the body and dance in today's urgent activism and resistance.

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Feminist Magazine is a weekly radio show: Intersectional feminism, news, views & culture. Grassroots to Global, stories you hear nowhere else, from all kinds of kickass feminists making change.

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She's back! Jaime Shearn Coan sees taisha paggett at the Whitney

taisha paggett’s Geography of We
by Jaime Shearn Coan, The Brooklyn Rail, May 6, 2014

Shared space: Rebecca Davis and taisha paggett at Danspace Project

Every form of dance--no matter its purpose--presses into service the large and small mechanisms of the human body. A wonderful machine, and certainly much more than that. Choreographers Rebecca Davis and taisha paggett--now sharing a season at Danspace Project--both bring that machinery to the foreground.

Davis's quartet, will however happen, opens with two women posed on all fours, side by side, with their heads and cascading tresses hung low over the floor. In time, they retract their heads in perfect start-stop motion and make hydaulic sounds like backhoes or other equipment. It's startling, but not nearly as startling as dancer Erin Cairns Cella's ability to rapidly crawl around the space belly-up with her delicate-looking hands directing and propelling her--which looks tough on those wrists. For her part, Carolyn Hall might remind you of the agitator of a washing machine as she turns with one fist raised, the other arm resting atop her head. Existing in some hazy space between object and humanity, these performers disturb the expectations of their viewers.

paggett's quartet, a right-angled object who lost her faith in being upright--tantalizing title, that--features herself and others skittering around like identical wound-up toys. Their costumes, which otherwise resemble a kind of chaste sleepwear, include white earphones and clear plastic capelets. The protective capelets, that little detail--like the way paggett opens proceedings by ringing a triangle--fits the M.O. of this artist as a highly creative scavenger.

Davis's collaborating dancers (who also include Lydia Christman and Kay Ottinger) give admirable physical performances in will however happen. paggett with her crew (Rebecca Bruno, Willy Souly and Anna Martine Whitehead), though, took me the extra mile.

There's the realization that this artist is capable of taking anything she can get her hands on--object, person, space, idea--and turning it into something else, simply because she can. A clear sense of agency, of knowing her own mind. That hits hard, and that makes paggett someone who will be interesting to continue to watch as she develops.

But what really sealed the deal for me came late in the piece. The performing body becomes not just an abstract idea at a distance but something, with all of its weight and sweat and vulnerability, that depends upon you. A wonderful machine, and certainly much more than that.

See the final evening of works by Rebecca Davis and taisha paggett tonight at 8pm at Danspace Project. Click here for information and tickets.

*****

Related:

taisha paggett
(photo to Taka Yamamoto)

Be sure to read Jaime Shearn Coan's June 2013 interview with taisha paggett in my sister blog, Dancer's Turn.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (corner Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

Alone and not so: Hilary Clark, Caroline Gravel, Taisha Paggett

Dance Magazine has just posted my review of Solos & Solitudes: Hilary Clark, Caroline Gravel, Taisha Paggett at Danspace Project--although, they've misspelled Taisha's last name. Perhaps that will be fixed by the time you see it. Click here to have a look!

Itching to write?

Call for submission for itch 9: Before/After:a small book of predictions, outcomes, and paradigm shifts

Once again, itch invites you to contribute your words, images and ideas to our upcoming issue:

itch 9, Before/After: a small book of predictions, outcomes, and paradigm shifts.

Please find the call for submissions below. The deadline is December 1st. As always, feel free to contact us at submit@itchjournal.org if you have any questions.


(vote! vote! vote!)
yours truly,
team itch

Taisha Paggett, Sara Wolf, Meg Wolfe



CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: itch 9

Before/After: a small book of predictions, outcomes, and paradigm shifts


Poised on the political razor's edge of the looming election, the soundtrack for change is running—but, for better or for worse? As we sit on the cusp of this, one of the most important—and symbolically loaded—U.S. presidential elections... and begin drafting yet another list of resolutions as yet another new year approaches... and witness a baby boom big enough to transform the demographics of our local dance population, we can't help but consider those moments in ours lives in which we hover on Big Decisions that, once made, have the capacity to radically change the compasses we use to locate ourselves—for better or for worse. This, in turn, reminds us of making art: the initial brilliance of an idea, the dread we encounter when we can't figure out what the hell we were thinking, artist's blocks, unforeseen circumstances, production nightmares, getting out of our own way... and what happens when the work is finished, when we are left with the reality of what we created / exposed / elected / capsized / deconstructed / demolished / uprooted?


We the people of this After Christ/After Common era, post-9/11, post-tsunami, post-Katrina, pre-apocalypse (you think?) live on a timeline of events. itch 9 is on everything having to do with Befores and Afters. For this issue, we're interested in hearing about those events, decisions, and moments in life and art-making that have constructed (or will construct) a 'before' and 'after' in your sense of how you live, move through, and have a voice in your world.


We encourage submissions in a range of forms and tones: narrative, poetical, ruminative, theoretical, and visual; pre- and post- charts, scores, and project photographs—on such possible tangents as: mental/emotional renewal; create your own adventure stories; "the transition"; presidential elections; private or public/natural (or not) disasters; unforeseen acts of god(desses) or foreseeable consequences; the fashionable and the not; flights of fancy vs. Important Work; break-ups, break-throughs, breakfasts, and break-outs; tectonic shifts in your artistic/political/social/spiritual/conceptual practice; "giving birth" to… ; resolutions, predictions, hopes and wishes; temporality: past, present, and future; and (make your own) timelines.


And, since we're looking ahead, humor us: send us your IN/OUT, HOT/NOT lists.



*For our rolling dialogue section, please submit your responses to issue 8: Pornocracy*


(As we ruminate on these ideas, here is a toast to the now, the unknown, and the unknowable...)



D E A D L I N E: DECEMBER 1, 2008


send submissions, questions, and provocations as attached, uncompressed word files to
submit@itchjournal.org


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itch is an evolving art project in the form of a journal that aspires to serve the community of dancers and other artists of the Los Angeles area and beyond. Practice participation in the developing LA dance culture: insert your thoughts, your body, your voice. help itch grow should you be enhanced by it...

Got an itch? Get one!

itch journal (issue #8)
sweet release party and reading

Tuesday, September 16th, 6-9pm, in the REDCAT lounge!
Readings begin at 7pm, come early for music, $3 drinks, and your own copy of itch!

Fresh off the presses, the much-awaited itch journal #8: pornocracy
arrives at the REDCAT lounge on Tuesday, September 16
631 West 2nd Street @ corner of Hope Street, Los Angeles, CA'

Be among the first to pick up this hot and heavy special issue, in which our contributors get emotionally and sometimes physically naked as they take an up-close and unabashed look at the line between choreography and pornography; the metaphoric capacity of dancing bodies vs. the explicitness of actual flesh; moral valuations and intercessions of/in bodiliness; and the politically efficacious and tactical use of the particular, the graphic, and the carnal.

team itch (editors Taisha Paggett, Sara Wolf, Meg Wolfe) invites you to come celebrate with us as issue contributors give a taste of this delectable issue and revisit highlights from past itches.

itch journal #8: pornocracy is a limited edition special issue featuring 50+ pages of artists writing from Los Angeles, NYC, San Francisco, and Berlin, plus a full-color portfolio with our centerfold contest winner(s).

copies of itch #8 will be available for sale, $6 per copy. past issues also available for sale.

click here for more info and more ways to get itch.

itch is an evolving art project in the form of a journal that aspires to serve the community of dancers and other artists of the Los Angeles area and beyond.

Practice participation in the developing LA dance culture: insert your thoughts, your body, your voice. help itch grow should you be enhanced by it...

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