CW2, Curators, events, news, platform, writer-in-residence

PLATFORM 2012: Parallels, Present-Past-Present. Carl Paris on week one of Parallels.

Present
On February 2nd, and with much buzz and excitement, Danspace Project and The Studio Museum in Harlem presented The Artist’s Voice: Ishmael Houston-Jones in Conversation with Wangechi Mutu and Thomas Lax, the first of its eight-week series PLATFORM 2012: Parallels. Held at The Studio Museum of Harlem to a packed audience, the event marked the 30th Anniversary of Houston-Jones’s ground breaking Parallels, which featured then emergent black postmodern dance choreographers at Danspace Project in 1982 and toured Europe in 1987. Thursday’s event provided a rare opportunity for Houston-Jones to converse with visual artist Ms. Mutu and curator Mr. Lax about key aspects of his work and issues surrounding the notion of black postmodern dance, as well as inaugurate PLATFORM 2012, which will feature a diverse line-up of performances, discussions, and screenings by veteran and emergent black postmodern choreographers over the months of February and March 2012.

The Artist's Voice. The Studio Museum in Harlem, February 2, 2012. Photo: Carolyn Hall.

So why convene a series dedicated to black postmodern dance? What do we mean by black postmodern dance? What kinds of issues might black postmodern dancers address? Read the rest of this post »

CW2, Curators, events, news, platform

Excerpt: Ishmael Houston-Jones’ curatorial statement from Parallels catalogue

The following is an excerpt from Ishmael Houston-Jones’s curatorial statement, which appears in the catalogue for PLATFORM 2012: Parallels. Join us on February 2 for our public program The Artist’s Voice: Ishmael Houston-Jones in Conversation with Wangechi Mutu and Thomas J. Lax, where you can purchase a copy of the catalogue. More info about Parallels programming, here.

Ishmael Houston-Jones at Danspace Project, 1982. Photo: Pamela Moore.

PLATFORM 2012: Parallels begins for me with a question—with a series of questions.  In her groundbreaking 2003 book on the eponymous subject, The Black Dancing Body, Brenda Dixon Gottschild interviewed a wide range of people in the field including Bebe Miller, Bill T. Jones, Gus Solomons, Jr., Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Meredith Monk, Ralph Lemon, Ronald K. Brown, and Wendy Perron.  Dixon Gottschild asked them to use “memory, fantasy, dreams, my thology…” to answer the question: “what images come to the mind’s eye when the term ‘black dance’ is said?”[1] This has been my conundrum when curating this platform. How would I have answered her question?  For me does “Black Dance” even exist? And assuming it does, what defines it?  Read the rest of this post »

CW2, events, news, platform

Announcing Winter 2012 at Danspace Project!

Winter is here! Our Winter 2012 season is filled-to-the-brim with new work by more than 40 emerging and established movement artists.

The season begins with reprisals of two evening-length 2010/11 Danspace Project commissions by Robert Steijn & Maria Hassabi and Tere O’Connor Dance. Danspace Project is re-presenting these pieces to coincide with Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) Annual Meeting in New York City. If you missed Tere O’Connor Dance’s sold out run this past week, you’ll have another chance to see Cover Boy!

Danspace Project is honored to present new work by the singular, extraordinary choreographer Keely Garfield, and to continue our DraftWork series of works-in-progress, followed by the much-anticipated next chapter in Danspace Project’s Platform series, PLATFORM 2012: Parallels, curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones (pictured above at Danspace Project in 1982).

PLATFORM 2012: Parallels is the latest chapter of Danspace Project’s acclaimed Platforms series. This Platform marks the 30th anniversary of Houston-Jones’ groundbreaking project Parallels, which originally took place at Danspace Project in 1982 and featured post-modern African-American choreographers Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Blondell Cummings, Fred Holland, Christina Rrata Jones, Gus Solomons, jr., and the late Harry Whittaker Sheppard. In 1987 they performed at the American Center in Paris with additional artist Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder of Urban Bush Women. As Houston-Jones wrote in the original program: “while all the choreographers participating are Black and in some ways relate to the rich tradition of Afro-American dance, each has chosen a form outside of that tradition and even outside the tradition of mainstream modern dance.”

Today, Houston-Jones revisits this premise and asks “In a time when the President of the United States is the progeny of a Kenyan and a European American, what real meaning do the terms ‘Black,’ ‘Afro-American,’ or ‘African-American’ hold? Does ‘outside the mainstream’ have the same resonance that it had three decades earlier? How have new generations’ ideas evolved from the time of the first Parallels?

As a part of Parallels, Danspace Project will publish a catalogue with contributions by Houston-Jones, Lemon, Miller, Zollar, as well as Dean Moss, Thomas DeFrantz, Wendy Perron, and Will Rawls. The catalogue will be the first publication to examine the legacy of New York-based black avant-garde dance artists of the 1980s. It will feature historic and contemporary photographs as well as biographical information about all of the nearly fifty artists involved. Judy Hussie-Taylor serves as Artistic Director of Danspace Project’s Platform series and Editor-in-Chief with Lydia Bell, curatorial fellow through the new ICPP program at Wesleyan, as Managing Editor. The catalogue will be on sale to the public starting February 1, 2012.

Over the eight weeks dance scholar Carl Paris will write bi-weekly essays which will be posted on Danspace Project’s blog, and included in a Danspace-published e-book featuring essays and images contextualizing Danspace’s 2012 Parallels Platform.

Visit our calendar and tickets page to read more about this exciting season!

CW2, news, writer-in-residence

Jenn Joy’s blog – Conversations Without Walls: Mutual Seductions, November 5

Mutual Seductions with participants: Connie Butler, DD Dorvillier, Mika Rottenberg, Suzanne Bocanegra, Jenny Schlenzka, Brennan Gerard, Ryan Kelly, Mika Tajima, Huffa Frobes-Cross, Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion. Moderated by Jenn Joy. Followed by questions with Judy Hussie-Taylor.

…to continue from where we left off in October.

The title for this second conversation event Mutual Seductions acts as a cipher for my own desire to escape from the claustrophobic categorization of something called dance versus something called visual arts. When framed as a polemic, I sense we immediately find ourselves facing a dead end that doesn’t allow for attending to qualities of contingency, influence, implication, proximity already present in works across discipline. So instead of playing out this either or framing, I want to shift the frame to think about choreography as a mode, technique, concept that already underwrites these practices and techniques or perhaps becomes a point of contact across disciplinary lines.

And then this returns to the refrain of these “conversations without walls”: why choreography now? What does choreography offer in the midst of this particular moment of cultural crisis when one response to the incredible frustration with power, media, and impotence of speaking against has exploded or rather been directed into a multiple occupations in real space. How might choreography as concept and practice figure in this dynamic? Read the rest of this post »

CW2, news

Jenn Joy’s blog – Conversations Without Walls: Ecstatic Alliances, October 1, 2011

Thoughts following Conversations without Walls
Ecstatic Alliances, Saturday, October 1, 2011
Participants: Judy Hussie-Taylor, Ishmael Houston-Jones, David Parker, Melinda Ring, Ralph Lemon, Jeremy Wade, Tim Griffin, Dean Moss. Moderated by Jenn Joy.

To continue the conversation… THANK YOU again to all of the participants for the generosity of your words and time and to Judy Hussie-Taylor for her invitation to imagine these conversations in the first place.

Coming to writing… I’m stealing this phrase from Hélène Cixous as it speaks to the time lag of translation from this first Conversation without Walls into something of a written reflection. I sense Cixous’s relationship to writing is a choreographic one: writing requires movement and a desire to decipher something that might not be legible. Listen to her first line: “In the beginning, I adored. What I adored was human. Not persons; not totalities, not defined and named being. But signs. Flashes of being that glanced off me, kindling me. Lightening-like bursts that came to me: Look!”

The flashes and bursts and trajectories from these compelling conversations are still coming into focus. What follows are my provisional reflections on the dramaturgy of the table: invitation, approach, participation, exit and one final curtain call.

Part of the impetus for this series was to look directly at issues surrounding contemporary choreographic practice to ask how choreography is being thought as concept and as process. What does choreography produce socially, relationally, politically? What openings does it suggest for curating and writing and art-making practices? Why does choreography matter now? Read the rest of this post »

news, platform

Announcing Fall 2011 at Danspace Project

A LETTER FROM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, JUDY HUSSIE-TAYLOR

Dear Friends,

Our exciting fall season includes performances and premieres from a wide range of movement artists including the inimitable Deborah Hay – returning for a one-night-only benefit performance – and a special performance by Ruth Zaporah, founder of Action Theater. Danspace Project will present international artists Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion, and Hooman Sharifi, as well as new work by Vanessa Anspaugh, Kimberly Bartosik, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Brennan Gerard & Ryan Kelly, Heather Kravas, Jeremy Wade, and Tere O’Connor. We will continue our well-loved community programs FOOD FOR THOUGHT with curators Douglas Dunn, Jack Ferver, and Pam Tanowitz, and DraftWork curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones.

Our “Conversations Without Walls” series is intended to continue the dialogue sparked by the acclaimed Platforms, providing further context through discussions of past and future Platforms, current issues in dance, performance and the arts today. We invited Jenn Joy to organize this series of talks based on ideas that have emerged during the Platforms over the last two years. Danspace Project’s Platform series is part of a larger initiative entitled the Choreographic Center Without Walls (CW2) which aims to examine and discover new ways of providing context, curatorial support and space for choreographers and their work.

We invite you to join us and look forward to seeing you at Danspace Project this fall!

Warm regards,

Judy Hussie-Taylor
Executive Director

news, platform

“Collaborating with Circumstances”: Final curator’s letter from Melinda Ring


Melinda Ring
Photo: Howard Silver

Collaborating with Circumstances

Collaborating with Circumstances -the missing topic from the Living Room Conversations event. We dropped it due to time constraints, but I still can’t let it go. It is the secret essential underlying discussion of our recently concluded platform, Susan Rethorst: Retro(intro)spective.

In planning documents I described the topic like this:

How do personal and political (i.e. money) circumstances enter into the art making process-how do they intrude, alter, and present unforeseen opportunities in the studio and in producing/presenting work? Once in the studio, how does something always work out even when the circumstances are not perfect? Read the rest of this post »

news, platform, video

Time Lapse video of Susan Rethorst moving in!

Platform curator Melinda Ring shot this video of Susan and the movers on moving day when all of Susan’s living room furniture was transported into Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church. Enjoy!

Rethorst Furniture Moving Time Lapse from Melinda Ring on Vimeo.

news, platform, press

Dance Magazine Review of Retro(intro)spective

Susan Rethorst: Retro(intro)spective
by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Dance Magazine
June 2011
www.dancemagazine.com

“Susan Rethorst: Retro(intro)spective”—curated by Melinda Ring for Danspace Project’s PLATFORM 2011—sprawled throughout St. Mark’s Church and all over Danspace’s late-spring calendar. Conceived—and named—with just the right blend of intelligence, tenderness, and cheek, the series included cozy movie nights, five hours of “living room” conversations among artists, an open rehearsal, more rehearsals “wrecked” by invited colleagues like Tere O’Connor, a multimedia installation and, yes, even a dance show here or there. With just a few exceptions, these events were free, and most welcomed visitors to come and go and they pleased.

In a play on the notion of “residency,” the series immersed us in the atmosphere and artifacts of Rethorst’s Lower East Side home/workspace—an apartment she recently sold and would soon vacate. She unloaded a selection of her living room furniture into the church’s sanctuary. When you watched Carl Reiner’s comic film All of Me with Rethorst, you might share her tomato-red sofa, the same sofa where, in another event, dancemakers Ralph Lemon and Yasuko Yokoshi would curl up like cats to trade ideas with poet Bruce Andrews and filmmaker/photographer Babette Mangolte. The sofa would also prove pivotal to one of Rethorst’s latest creations, 208 East Broadway Part 3: Over and Out.

That surreal piece positioned dancers on and around Rethorst’s furniture, fitting human bodies into any available spaces. The dreamy pacing, simple gestures, and everyday objects—a cookie-cutter, seashell, ball, length of ribbon, tile of wood—and sober yet somewhat ritualistic performance combined to create numinous mystery. Read the full review here

City/Dans, press, video

An excerpt of Kate Weare’s “Lean-to” (Danspace Project premiere, 2009)

Check out this beautiful video of Kate Weare’s Lean-to, which premiered at Danspace Project in 2009.


Filmed by Charlie Steiner for the New York Public Library archives.

The New York Times review of Weare’s recent run at The Joyce Theater is here

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