MOMA to explore work of Judson Dance Theater artists

Peter Moore. Performance view of Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton
in Brown’s Trillium, Concert of Dance #4, January 30, 1963.
© Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Courtesy Paula Cooper, New York

Museum of Modern Art

announces its upcoming exhibition:

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done

September 16, 2018–February 03, 2019

Ana Janevski, Curator

Thomas J. Lax, Associate Curator

with Martha Joseph, Curatorial Assistant,

Department of Media and Performance Art

For a brief period in the early 1960s, a group of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers made use of a local church to present performances that Village Voice critic Jill Johnston declared the most exciting new developments in dance in a generation. Redefining the kinds of movement that could count as dance, the Judson participants—Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, Bill Dixon, Judith Dunn, David Gordon, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Rudy Perez, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, and Elaine Summers, among others—would go on to profoundly shape all fields of art in the second half of the 20th century. Taking its name from the Judson Memorial Church, a socially engaged Protestant congregation in New York’s Greenwich Village, Judson Dance Theater was organized as a series of open workshops from which its participants developed performances. Together, the artists challenged traditional understandings of choreography, expanding dance in ways that reconsidered its place in the world. They employed new compositional methods to strip dance of its theatrical conventions, incorporating “ordinary” movements—gestures typical of the street or home, for example, rather than a stage—into their work, along with games, simple tasks, and social dances to infuse their pieces with a sense of spontaneity.

Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done highlights the ongoing significance of the history of Judson Dance Theater, beginning with the workshops and classes led by Anna Halprin, Robert Ellis Dunn, and James Waring and exploring the influence of other figures working downtown such as Simone Forti and Andy Warhol, as well as venues for collective action like Judson Gallery and the Living Theatre. Through live performance and some 300 objects including film, photographic documentation, sculptural objects, scores, music, poetry, architectural drawings, and archival material, the exhibition celebrates the group’s multidisciplinary and collaborative ethos as well as the range of its participants. The Work Is Never Done includes a gallery exhibition, a print publication, and an ambitious performance program in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium.

Exhibition information

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Happy Holidays! Trisha Brown repertory at The Joyce

Trisha Brown Dance Company in
Brown's Groove and CountermoveBelow: Geometry of Quiet
(photos: Stephanie Berger)

Imagine The Joyce Theater, or some other lucky venue, making Trisha Brown Dance Company an annual holiday-time tradition! Works like what the Joyce has aqcuired for this season--L’Amour au Théâtre, 2009; Geometry of Quiet, 2002; Groove and Countermove, 2002--possess both the late choreographer's postmodern-pioneer cred and her luscious, eye-pleasing appeal in a time when we all could use some reassurance and soothing. I can easily foresee a future in which Ailey and the usual Nutcrackers share the bounty of the holiday season with TBDC, now under the leadership of Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden.

This is work, too, that might aspire to heal the desperate rawness we feel now across the spectrum of gender. The dances persist in showing egalitarian interactions between and among bodies. L’Amour au Théâtre, set to excerpts from Rameau's opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, is particularly good with this as gender never determines who will grasp, lift and support whom. Brown seems to advise, "Just do the next thing that needs doing." Bodies quietly, efficiently align themselves to be as ready and humbly useful as possible, no one more powerful than another in an unpredictable landscape they create and re-create by their moving. No one flies tremendously high, literally or figuratively. One's virtuosity--if we choose to call it that--lies in the ability to go all quicksilver fluid and responsive in that space between heaven and gravity.

A duet of two women opens Geometry of Quiet, a quartet set to music by Salvatore Sciarrino, taking a different route to the same locale. The music--played live by flutist Sato Moughalian stationed at stage left--breathes, but it can also bark. Leah Ives and Amanda Kmett'Pendry, gleaming in white, each stretch out, front and back, from one firmly-grounded standing leg, a picturesque image. But they end up clasping each other like jigsaw pieces with only as much individuality to be able to fit and lock together perfectly. No surprise that Groove and Countermove's dancers, in their Crayola array of costumes, seem like drawing implements in the hand of a smart, happy child. Brown's choreography invites us to focus, breathe, be flexible, be surprised, take pleasure in the unending doing and discovering.

Trisha Brown Dance Company runs through Sunday, December 17. Tonight's program includes a "curtain chat" moderated by Wendy Perron, dance writer, educator and former Trisha Brown dancer. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Trisha Brown: a loving community offers thanks

Leah Morrison

A bouquet of images from

Bird/Woman/Flower/Dare Devil: 

Trisha Brown

A Community Memorial

Saturday, October 28, 2017

at Danspace Project

organized by Iréne Hultman Monti and friends

All photos 

by Ian Douglas

Ralph Lemon (above)
Tere O'Connor (below)

Trisha Brown, Lemon said, was "our feral dancing goddess."
"...shifting from a fireball to a whisper in a second," said O'Connor.

"Be your most gracious self." -- Trisha Brown

Sam Miller

Stacy Spence

Yvonne Rainer

"In rehearsal, you want to be as correct as possible.

In performance, it's a whole other ballgame."

--Trisha Brown

Stephen Petronio

Iréne Hultman

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Gather this Saturday to remember Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown (1936-2017)
(photo: Marc Ginot, courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company)

A Community Memorial

Honoring the Life and Work of Trisha Brown

Saturday, October 28

Noon through 5pm

Danspace Project

Danspace Project and the dance community at large celebrate the legacy of choreographer Trisha Brown (1936-2017), who altered how we perceive, create, and understand dance since forming her company in 1970. Over five hours, Brown’s company alums, colleagues, and admirers will speak, dance, reminisce, and pay tribute to one of our history’s greatest influencers.

This event is free and open to the public and guests may come and go throughout the day. All are welcome to join in paying homage to Brown and her legacy in transforming our worldwide artistic community.

12pm-1pm:

Judy Hussie-Taylor

Iréne Hultman

Wendy Perron

Susan Rosenberg

1pm-2pm:

Denise Luccioni

Laurel Jenkins

Nancy Dalva

Liz Gerring

Stephen Petronio

Val Bourne

2pm-3pm:

Babette Mangolte

Liz Thompson

Sam Miller

Ralph Lemon

Tere O’Connor

3pm-4pm:

Hendel Teicher

Jennifer Tipton

Yvonne Rainer

Jon Kinzel

4pm-5pm:

Philip Bither

Bill T. Jones

Adam Brown

Dancing by Trisha Brown Dance Company Alums:

Kathleen Fisher, Lance Gries, Iréne Hultman, Laurel Jenkins, Eva Karczag, Tara Lorenzen, Mariah Maloney, Leah Morrison, Brandi Norton, Wendy Perron, Jaime Scott, Shelley Senter, Vicky Shick, Keith Thompson, Abby Yaeger

Excerpts of pieces:

Accumulation, Group Primary Accumulation, Glacial Decoy, Opal Loop, Son of Gone Fishing, Set and Reset, Foray Foret, Groove, If You Couldn’t See Me

Screenings of full pieces will be on view in the Parish Hall.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (off Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Catch this now: A new, slow look at "Trio A"

Video installation of
David Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
at Danspace Project
(photo: Lily Cohen)

No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

--Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto

Okay, no glamour, maybe, but I am completely seduced by the wealth of physical energy and concealed/revealed information streaming through David Michalek's slowed-down video interpretation of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966), here and now at Danspace Project spanning three, large suspended video screens and performed by a succession of 46 soloists. Pat Catterson, a member of Rainer's Raindears troupe, coached performers in the tricky subtleties of Rainer's doing without DOING!  For example, if you reach down as if to pick a bottle from the floor, don't make much of it. It's just a bottle and just a reach. No drama.

David Thomson, one of 46 dancers
performing in Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
(photo: Mark Kornbluth)

Anyone thinking Rainer's so-called pedestrian movement is, in fact, simple or easy will get a big ol' surprise from Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA and might even find a kind of virtuosity in it. (If you caught Michalek's original Slow Dancing, in 2007, at Lincoln Center Plaza, you know he knows from glamorous star power, spectacle...and s-l-o-wwwwnesssss.) But, for goodness sake, was Rainer's Trio A ever anything but engagingly focused, confident, exhilarating in execution? No way will she ever not be my anti-hero hero.

Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA, presented in collaboration with Rainer, continues at Danspace Project tonight and concludes tomorrow evening. Both screenings are available from 6pm to 10pm. Viewers may come and go as they please and can also view Sally Banes' 1978 film of Rainer dancing Trio A.

Admission is free with RSVP recommended. For reservations, visit danspaceproject.org or call (866) 811.4111.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Looking at Lucinda, then and now

Scenes from Dance (2009) by Lucinda Childs
(photos: Sally Cohn)

I regret missing Barnard College Dance Department's recent evening with Lucinda Childs and French filmmaker Patrick Bensard, director of the 2005 documentary, Lucinda Childs. Just short of an hour, the film traces notable influences and milestones in the dance artist's career--her exposure to the aesthetics of Cunningham and Cage, explorations with her fellow Judson iconoclasts such as Yvonne Rainer, magisterial flights through the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson universe.

It is Wilson, interviewed by Bensard, who best sums up the multitude within Childs, the mixed feelings she and her elegant, minimalist aesthetic can stir in a viewer. He describes a being at once soft and severe, hot and cold, and he appears to love her every polarized contradiction. The film includes wonderful excerpts of Childs, Mikhail Baryshnikov and other dancers performing her choreography--skimming the floor and slicing through air like figure skaters, earth and its gravity mere playthings to these mercurial figures.

Worth any price of admission are the brief glimpses of her solo Carnation, made in 1964 when I was 12 and a decade away from starting to write about dance. Maybe only a woman as frosty-looking as Childs could be this wickedly clever, surreal and funny in her ritualistic precision, crowning herself with a flexible strainer basket, carefully stuffing kitchen sponges into her mouth and fanning the stack open like a duck's bill.  How I wish I could see it performed live now.

* * *

See the fall season of The Lucinda Childs Dance Company at The Joyce Theater, November 29-December 11. The first week's program includes the New York premiere of a Joyce commission, The Sun Roars Into View (2016), and the second week features Childs's signature work, Dance (1979) with a commissioned score by Philip Glass and the original film decor by Sol LeWitt.

For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue (corner of 19th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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to InfiniteBody.

Click here!

Sally Gross, 81

Sally Gross, Choreographer of Minimalist Dances, Dies at 81
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, July 24, 2015

Susan Rethorst: A Choreographic Mind

I've just finished reading essays by a dancemaker who, while pressing words to fine use, celebrates quiet, visceral intuition over verbal, intellectual modes of being that are usually more highly prized. Susan Rethorst's A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings (Teatterikorkeakoulu: Kinesis 2, 2012) takes her readers deep into the sensibilities of an artist who chooses to embrace "not knowing, not quite controlling," honoring what her body tells her and what the dances she makes tell her, too.

The book presents two strands for us to follow: Rethorst's life-altering experiences in youth and her application of personal transformation to creative process. In a custody dispute, her father kidnapped her and her brother Johnny when they were quite young. Two years later, he kidnapped the boy again and, this time, she would not see Johnny until he was 21. I get the impression that while Rethorst must relate this disturbing history--which left her, into adulthood, disinclined to speak but inclined to watch people intently and read the subtle currents and language of bodies--she does so only to set the stage for a calm exploration of how dances are made, how they reveal and present themselves and how they might best be perceived by maker and witness alike.

Rethorst's discussions could benefit fellow choreographers; clearly, she hopes to share her ideas with young artists who frequently stumble over treacherous piles of shoulds and shouldn'ts--what this favored artist does, what that prominent critic appears to reject or champion, what Teacher says is the right thing to do, what's trendy among peers or presenters this season. To these artists, she offers her trust in the unconscious, the body, the ongoing conversation with the dance itself.

The mainstream dance critic, picking up this book, will feel his/her ears burn:

Basically, they tell you what they want to see, and how the piece before them does, or does not, answer to that. It is rare to hear people try to cut through their own taste to try to examine what the dance maker is doing with the form.

Elsewhere, she writes,

What it, the dance, is doing is a door to see what it is valuing, what its goals are, how it functions. Talk about dance is too often, in my opinion, full of implied lack, and the lacks reveal what the particular talker desires to get out of dance.

For someone who grew up not caring to talk much--and, in this and in Rethorst's talent for intuitive perception of people, spaces and things, I strongly identify with her--she certainly enlivens these pages with an impressive, persuasive voice. But, she advises, "don't take my word for it." (Word. There's that word, again....) Yes, your mileage may vary at times, but the journey will take you places you could never anticipate.

Order this book online.

Halprin: a way of connecting

Still Asing All the Right Questions

by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, April 4, 2010

Influential Halprin

The Woman Who Influenced the Influential Choreographers

by Julie Bloom, The New York Times, March 12, 2010

"24 x 4 x 4" by 1

Written for the Movement Research 2008 Spring Festival blog:

This morning, from my friend Serge in Paree, I receive the following wonderful explanation:

"Esprit d'escalier (meaning: what comes up in your mind (when you leave where you've been) while you're going down the stairs--what you should've said, I have those alot, I try not to take elevators, walking up and down is good for you, but I'm getting off track here, oh, well)."

So, what was my esprit d'escalier as I walked up and down the stairs between dance pieces at Movement Research's 24 x 4 x 4 show last night?

After Piece #1 (do these things even have titles? can I get a list of the hastily-read-off names of participating choreographers, please?): "I thought maybe the tunnel would go on forever." Security guards in sunglasses in the car was the best part. Or maybe the mimicking of those iPod silhouette poster boys and girls. A video of dance that largely happens inside a car. Talk about creative constraints!

After Piece #2: Serial beer-swilling by the Frigidaire light, killer voiceover, and that image of a figurine of a flower-bedecked cow projected just beneath Judson's rose window? My winner. Let's see this again!

After Piece #3: Hmmm... Maybe not. After standing outside the gym's closed door and watching strobe lighting flash through the cracks while all sorts of banging and strange vocal sounds leaked out, and then watching the door open part way, harsh light crashing over the people closest to it, I wanted something more earth-shaking to be going on inside.

After Piece #4: Prop- and sound-driven. Requires some assembly. Best visual/sonic element: cylinders made of rolled-up sheets of aluminum foil walked across a couple of taut strings spanning the space. Best thing here: Everybody's very musician-like, task-focused cool.

If you were teamed up with three other artists (chosen at random) and given 24-hours to concoct a performance, what might you do? Does that sound scary? Does it sound kicky? Does it sound like something that should happen more often?

Trajal Harrell: Body and Soul Podcast

The talented Trajal Harrell is one of dance's versatile, committed workers. He has learned to balance various roles including performer, choreographer, curator, journal editor and instructor. His innovative art, in concept and execution, investigates the links between postmodern and popular aesthetics.

Dance Theater Workshop will host the premiere of Harrell's "Quartet for the End of Time," October 15-18, 2008. This full-evening work for four dancers takes the story of Olivier Messiaen's famous music of
the same name (composed and first performed by Jewish and Christian musicians in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp) as a foundation for investigating the antagonism between sincerity and irony in our contemporary time.

BIO

Trajal Harrell was born in Douglas, Georgia. He graduated from Yale University, majoring in American Studies with a concentration in creative processes--researching theater, literary theory and art history. He has also studied dance and choreography at Brown University, The Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, The San Francisco Institute of Choreography, City College of San Francisco, Movement Research and the Trisha Brown School. His work has been performed in various venues in the US and Europe.

In 1998, he was selected as an artist-in-residence at Movement Research and has been active in the development of research projects and curation, including curating an initiative to diversify Movement Research's programming through selection of artists of color for performance opportunities. He has served in editorial capacities for the Movement Research Performance Journal and was appointed editor-in-chief in 2006.

LINKS

Movement Research:
http://www.movementresearch.org/

Dance Theater Workshop:
http://www.dtw.org

Body and Soul is the official podcast of InfiniteBody dance blog at
http://infinitebody.blogspot.com. Subscribe through iTunes or at
http://magickaleva.hipcast.com/rss/bodyandsoul.xml.

(c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

This material may not be reproduced in any way, either in part or in its entirety, without the expressed written permission of Eva Yaa Asantewaa.

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Funhouse: Yanira Castro transforms DTW

Yanira Castro + Company will give two more performances of Center of Sleep at Dance Theater Workshop (tonight and Saturday night) and, if you can, you must go.

I can't say I'm happy to see all of the details of the installation and action given away by Dance View Times's reviewer, Tom Phillips. In this work, the audience is best left unprepared, fresh for the experience and for the invitation to--as a neat non-instruction card instructs us--"Do as you please." (The rest of the card reads, "Assurances for an audience/No one will touch you./No one will ask anything of you./You are safe." The reverse advises--but does not demand--that we leave our bags and coats in the check room.) I think the work's delicately powerful, powerfully delicate conclusion, if nothing else, needs to be a surprise for the new audiences. I would have held back on spelling out what happens there.

Let's just say that Yanira Castro and her collaborators--especially composer Stephan Moore and lighting and installation designer Roderick Murray--have brilliantly turned DTW's stage into a funhouse that is constantly changing and requiring you, the viewer, to also move and change as vivid dream visions and dream sounds reach you from everywhere. William Forsythe did something approaching this with his dance installation, You Made Me A Monster, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center nearly a year ago. Although Forsythe's theme was radically different, his piece was set in a dimly-lit studio and sent dancers out amid a standing, initially participatory audience. It too had a strange, striking sound score. But Center of Sleep is the far more searching, courageous and accomplished work.

Castro credits her performers as collaborators. They are marvelous, and they are Peggy Cheng, Luke Miller, Heather Olson, Joseph Poulson and Ashley Steele. Special honors to Stephan Moore, whose musical ingenuity knows no limit of means or delight.

How they carry on: Gill and Lewis

I'm not sure I was glad to walk home last night with old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs stuck on loop in my mind, but the reason was Beth Gill--specifically, a solo performance she gave at Dixon Place in a Brink series program curated by Michael Helland and shared with soloist Isabel Lewis.

In Resurrected Dance Dance III, Gill played the scratchy vinyl on an old turntable set up on a chair, both items silhouetted in front of DP's wall by the solo's initial illumination--a single nightlight. What got me was the way she calmly slowed, grounded and rested herself inside the lilting, tilting, sometimes driving force of voices and guitars; how, when she chose to step, she stepped like a quiet, watchful heron on the hunt. A compelling performer, Gill can pull and hold viewers' focus by drawing us out of the forward strain of ordinary time and into a place deep stillness and concentration. DP is the place for doing a lot (or a meaningful little) with simple, ordinary things, and Gill can be a kitchen magician.

Lewis's Untitled Solo (Sweet Exorcist) contains poetic, powerful imagery and energy. Like Gill's solo, it plays with the effect of light on body and objects and harkens back to the '60s and early '70s in its selection of recordings with songs by The Great Society with Grace Slick, Curtis Mayfield (the source of the "untitle") and the Ethiopian ensemble Alemayheu Eshete/Alem Girma Band.

I've no idea what either artist intended here, but each of their solos conclude in an unsettling way. Gill--who has re-dressed herself in a black hoodie and slacks--replaces the last CSN&Y anthem with a fingernails-on-chalkboard number from Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band. As the Ethiopian tune unfolds, Lewis begins to drape her body in lengths of golden fabric and does not stop until she has wrapped her head and face too and tied the gleaming cloth fast around her neck. Her glamorous, sinuous wriggles do nothing to lessen the chilling effect of this image.

For information on future events at Dixon Place, click here.

Nothing sweet about this salon!

The ladies of Sugar Salon invite you to a...heh-heh..modest, little tea party at Abrons Arts Center, tonight at 8pm. Come see what a trio of freethinking women choreographers can do when given time, space, practical support and the mentorship of Bessie Award-winner Donna Uchizono. Tasteful entertainment will include a wild new theatrical cornucopia from Heather McArdle/BLUEPRINTVIOLATION and a reprise of luciana achugar's Franny & Zooey, one of the bravest dances in memory, which premiered at Tere O'Connor's The Nothing Festival in 2007. (Click here to listen to my podcast interview with achugar and Barnard Dance Department chair Mary Cochran about Sugar Salon.) Reneé Archibald offers a peek at Curtain Wall, a developing work, and one hopes that the brilliant company she's been keeping will keep her moving.

As Apollinaire Scherr would say, just GO!

Information? Click http://www.henrystreet.org/arts
Tickets? 212-352-3101 or click here.

Nolini Barretto: Body and Soul podcast

Presenting site-specific dance in the bustling financial, commercial and historic environment of downtown Manhattan is not without risk but can yield considerable excitement and rewards. Producer-curator Nolini Barretto and the artists she selects for her annual Sitelines series bring imagination and vision to this challenge and opportunity. In summer 2007, I spoke with Nolini about past productions and current highlights of this well-regarded festival, a project of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (http://www.lmcc.net/).


GUEST BIO

Nolini Barretto has long been part of the New York arts community. She worked for the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance for thirteen years, the last few years as Administrative Director of the school. She was a founding Director of the Emergency Fund for Student Dancers and continues to serve on its Board and the advisory Board of Buglisi Dance Company. She was the Director of Marketing for Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea, helping it transition into its new building, managing its rebranding efforts and launching its Inaugural season. At DTW she received the National Arts Marketing Project's Advanced Audience Development Training. Nolini was originally a classical dancer in India and received a Masters degree in Arts Administration from Teachers College, Columbia University. In 2005 CEC Artslink sent her to lecture on Public Art in St. Petersburg, Russia and Novosibirsk, Siberia. Nolini began working at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2003, where she founded the site-specific performance series, Sitelines, which she continues to curate and produce. She is in her first year as a member of the Bessies (New York Dance and Performance) Awards committee.

LINK

http://www.lmcc.net/

Body and Soul is the official podcast of InfiniteBody dance blog at
http://infinitebody.blogspot.com. Subscribe through iTunes or at
http://magickaleva.hipcast.com/rss/bodyandsoul.xml.

(c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

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Luciana Achugar and Mary Cochran: Body and Soul podcast

Today, we’ll hear from Mary Cochran (Chair of the Dance Department, Barnard College of Columbia University) and Luciana Achugar (2007 Bessie Award-winning choreographer) about Sugar Salon, a program dedicated to mentoring, commissioning and presenting women at the forefront of contemporary choreography.

GUEST BIOS:

Luciana Achugar

Luciana Achugar is a Brooklyn-based Uruguayan choreographer. After moving to New York upon graduation from Cal Arts in 1995, Achugar danced with several choreographers, including Chameckilerner and John Jasperse. From 1999 to 2003, she worked in a close collaborative relationship with choreographer Levi Gonzalez. Their work was presented in New York by Dixon Place, Movement Research at Judson Church, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Dance-in-Progress at The Kitchen, and at Dance Theater. Achugar has also worked collaboratively with visual artists Marcos Rosales and Michael Mahalchick.

Mary Cochran

Department of Dance Chair and Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Barnard College of Columbia University, Mary Cochran has performed and taught on every continent except Antarctica. A renowned soloist with Paul Taylor Dance Company from 1984-1996, Cochran continues her association with Taylor to this day having completed 19 restagings of his masterworks and as Director of the Paul Taylor School’s Summer and Winter Intensives. Cochran has taught at numerous colleges and conservatories including Mills College, the Juilliard School, University of Michigan, Harvard University, and the North Carolina School of the Arts. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee in May of 2005.

UPCOMING EVENT:

See Sugar Salon's performances at Abrons Arts Center (February 15-16), featuring works by the 2007-08 residents: Luciana Achugar ("Franny and Zooey"), Renée Archibald ("Curtain Wall") and Heather McArdle/BLUEPRINTVIOLATION (excerpt from "Ballad of Arrivals & Departures"). Choreographer mentor Donna Uchizono will moderate a post-performance discussion with the artists on Friday, February 15. For full schedule and ticketing details, call 212-352-3101 or visit http://www.theatermania.com.

INFORMATION LINKS:

Department of Dance, Barnard College: http://www.barnard.edu/dance

Williamsburg Art NeXus (WAX): http://www.wax205.com

Abrons Arts Center: http://www.henrystreet.org/arts

Body and Soul is the official podcast of InfiniteBody dance blog at http://infinitebody.blogspot.com. Subscribe through iTunes or at http://magickaleva.hipcast.com/rss/bodyandsoul.xml.

(c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

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Mac Low observes Linyekula

Clarinda Mac Low begins the investigation with a work by Congolese choreographer, Faustin Linyekula. See her blog at Critical Correspondence.

Miguel Gutierrez

Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People will reprise "Everyone" at Dance Theater Workshop, Jan 14 -15. Here's an interview I conducted with Bessie Award-winning choreographer Miguel Gutierrez last summer.

Somewhere in the middle of my interview with Miguel, I realized that I could listen to him talk forever. (I've had that feeling about watching his dances, too!) Even after we wrapped up our recording, we kept talking, and he never ran out of interesting and vital things to say about art, community and the often sorry state of discourse on dance. I definitely want to talk with Miguel again, and I'm delighted to share with you today some insight into his life and work.

For more information and tickets to the January performances at DTW, visit http://www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/Gutierrez.

Subscribe to Body and Soul podcast at http://magickaleva.hipcast.com/rss/bodyandsoul.xml.

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Bill T. Jones continues our theme...

On November 20, 22 and 24, Bill T. Jones will present Walking the Line, a world premiere, at the Louvre in Paris. Commissioned by the Louvre as part of its newly created Frontières program, which this year is curated by the German painter Anselm Kiefer, Jones will be accompanied by the Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo and the French percussionist Florent Jodelet.

Walking the Line, a solo, was inspired by Jones’s desire as an African-American modern dance choreographer to be free to create without restraint, to take risks and criss-cross boundaries at will, and his desire to be accepted into the canon of Western art. The dance will take place in one of the most well-known, spectacular spaces in the Louvre: the long corridor between Michelangelo’s The Slaves and la Victoire de Samothrace (Winged Victory). The audience will be seated on the steps.

On November 23, Jones will speak in a public discussion with former Le Monde dance critic Dominique Frétard, at the Auditorium du Louvre.