Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer get together at Saint Mark's Church. “It is better to have loved and lost than to have put linoleum on your living room floor.” Yvonne Rainer read that aloud during her 2016 The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project— Altered Annually. And she read it again from one of the sheets of paper taped to the pillars in Saint Mark’s Church during Danspace … [Read more...]
Acknowledging the Past, Moving On
The Stephen Petronio Company revives works by those who have influenced him and offers a world premiere. Once upon a time, a choreographer of “modern dance” was expected to create his/her unique style—a difficult task, since human bodies are the material, and human bodies inevitably become imprinted with their histories. I think I would know a dance by Stephen Petronio if I met it in a dark … [Read more...]
Apollo Meets the Higgs Boson
Emily Coates' Incarnations premieres at St. Marks' Church, March 16 through 18. I know how to re-wire a lamp. I aced high school physics (eventually). While researching Merce Cunningham and John Cage, I read Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, which fit the zeitgeist of the 1970s. But my brain has to struggle to keep its head above water, so to speak (a lousy metaphor) during Danspace … [Read more...]
Emerging from, Returning to Dust
Yvonne Rainer's The Concept of Dust: Continuous Project—Altered Annually. So, a woman walks into The Kitchen and stands hesitantly before the audience. Behind her, at the back of the performing area, five dancers wait; there’s a gap in their shoulder-to-shoulder line. The woman—it is choreographer Yvonne Rainer— warns us, fumbling a bit for words, that she has bad news for us. About … [Read more...]
Filming Dance/Dancing Film
The 2016 Dance on Camera Festival. This year the Dance on Camera Festival celebrated its 44th anniversary and the 60th anniversary of Dance Films Association, which for the past 20 years has been partnering with the Film Society of Lincoln Center in presenting Dance on Camera. As usual, it was astonishing how many screenings, panels, master classes, workshops, and exhibits were fitted into … [Read more...]
Reconfiguring One’s Past in Art
In the iconoclastic Judson Dance Theater of the 1960s, visual artists Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Hay, and Robert Morris were among the choreographers and performers. The negotiations among them and their dance-world colleagues were boundlessly fruitful to both. In 1968, Yvonne Rainer wrote an essay titled “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity … [Read more...]