Critical Correspondence
Xavier Le Roy in Conversation with Will Rawls
Over the last twenty years, Xavier Le Roy has radically expanded the field of contemporary choreography, through solo and collective research-based practice. His diverse works question the limits of performance, exposing the conditions that govern artistic production in the theater. Increasingly, Le Roy has turned towards issues of addressing and engaging the public, and how […]
Neil Greenberg in Conversation with Biba Bell
As Neil Greenberg prepares to premiere his latest work, This, at New York Live Arts the first weekend of December, he discusses his motivating questions as well as the shifts in his choreographic concerns during the four years since his last piece, (like a vase). Citing Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” as an enduring theoretical […]
Leyya Tawil in Conversation with Linda Weintraub
Bay Area based choreographer and dance artist Leyya Tawil, also known for her extensive collaborations with composers Christopher Keyes (1999-2008), Mark Gergis (2009-2010), Lars J Brouwer (2011-2013), and Mike Khoury (ongoing), has been traveling the globe touring her current project Destroy// since its inception in San Francisco in 2012. Performed internationally in 19 cities thus […]
Chris Sharp in Conversation with Biba Bell
This autumn, dance and performance provided an essential means by which curators Chris Sharp (Mexico City) and Gianni Jetzer (New York) could reimagine public sculpture and the potentiality of urban space for Le Mouvement, the latest installment of the Swiss Sculpture Exhibition (founded in 1954). An expansive, threefold exhibition, Le Mouvement invited numerous works and […]
Brian Getnick in Conversation with Will Rawls
Angeleno, Brian Getnick reconnects with Will Rawls to outline his network of exciting projects, in which his sculptural and curatorial works create dynamic frames for other performance artists. Co-director (with Tanya Rubbak) of the collaborative L.A. performance journal, Native Strategies, and performer himself, Brian also extends his sights from L.A. to New York and Berlin, tilling the […]
Charles Aubin in Conversation with Abigail Levine
Curator and performance scholar Charles Aubin discusses his work at Paris’s Centre Pompidou and New York’s Performa Biennial, focusing on the current interest in live art and performing arts curation, particularly within the context of visual art institutions. Aubin addresses the differences in curatorial strategies in a yearlong programming calendar versus a biennial, the funding […]
Paloma McGregor in Conversation with Abigail Levine
While attending and dancing in Ishmael Houston-Jones’s 2012 Danspace Project platform series Parallels, artist-activist Paloma McGregor began to think about the lack of experimental forums in which Black dance artists were well-represented. How had the idea of artistic experimentation and radicality become tied to White culture? And untied from Black culture? Were critics and presenters […]
Moriah Evans in Conversation with Will Rawls
Occasionally found relaxing to videos of North Korean mass choreography, Moriah Evans reflects both on her individual choreographic practice and the critical, collective antics of The Bureau for the Future of Choreography. Evans maintains a vigilant eye on the stakes of art production while interrogating the traps of authorship, pursuing, instead, instances at the threshold […]
Simone Forti in Conversation with Jennie Goldstein
Since the early 1960s, Simone Forti has explored relationships between movement, objects, text, sound, and site. She has performed, taught, and displayed works in both the dance and visual art communities for decades, and as a result, her contributions have become touchstones for critical debates on dance and the museum. While Forti is perhaps best […]
Ligia Lewis in conversation with Will Rawls
Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in the U.S., Ligia Lewis now lives and works in Berlin. Her performance work poses questions about cultural embodiment, otherness and empathy while engaging modalities of dance and theater. For Art Basel’s Liste program [2014], she will present Sensation 1, her solo performance recently set on the dancer […]
Panoply Performance Lab founders Esther Neff and Brian McCorkle in conversation with Li Cata
Esther Neff and Brian McCorkle are the dynamic duo that comprise Panoply Performance Laboratory, a performance collective and performance space, located at 104 Meserole St. on the Bushwick/Williamsburg border. Their curations and performances betray a sympathy with experimental and oppositional aesthetics and politics, and the shows they host are by donation with all money given […]
Dr. Sally R. Sommer in Conversation with Abigail Levine
Sally Sommer has a unique eye on the history of post-modern dance. Arriving in New York in 1967, she fell immediately into the post-Judson scene, writing criticism and reviews for the Village Voice through the 70s and 80s. With a doctorate from NYU’s Performance Studies Department just as the discipline was forming, she went on […]
Noémie Solomon in Conversation with Will Rawls
Noémie Solomon and Will Rawls discuss DANSE: an anthology, Solomon’s new compilation of writings on contemporary dance. The anthology uniquely comprises recent scholarship from the last fifteen years and many of the essays are published in English for the first time. As the book weaves a thread among French contemporary dance practitioners and thinkers, […]
Photo by Camille McouatDana Michel in Conversation with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Is there such a thing as a black abstractionist aesthetic in live performance? Can the black body exist in live performance without the concern of euro-centric or westernized legibility? How might the female body behave in the public domain when void of the need to be stereotypically attractive in the eyes of the […]
Jonathan VanDyke, Bradley Teal Ellis, and David Rafael Botana in Conversation with J. Louise Makary
Although his practice incorporates performance, sculpture, and video, artist Jonathan VanDyke is often labelled a painter. He works outward from the medium of painting to explore how personal relationships affect the form and creation of works of art. Mark-making is executed upon canvases by two dancers, Bradley Teal Ellis and David Rafael Botana in an […]
