Critical Correspondence

MRPJ#8/A Travel Issue: Extras

“Every night lying in bed, under three blankets and sleeping, I have a strong feeling of how the human body is very, very soft, very unprotected. In a full darkness trembling under the mortar shelling, I can feel so clearly “their” intention to kill. This intention is so direct, so vulgar and simple at the same time. It is the real pornography. Sometimes the nights were so quiet, so dark, I couldn’t see my hand. It felt like being in a grave. Sarajevo now is a strange place, very surreal.” –from Fragments of Sarajevo by Izeta Gradevic

In celebration of Movement Research’s 30th Anniversary, Critical Correspondence is reprinting monthly excerpts from each of the first 30 Performance Journals. We will be featuring representative and relevant articles as well as each of the issues’ editorial note. It is both enervating and challenging to look at the historical map that precedes our time – the continuity of mission, the diverse attempts to “word” a practice, the voices that have gone and the ones that keep returning, the ongoing development of discourse alongside political struggles.

The time of Performance Journal #8: a travel issue is a time when Movement Research is beginning to emerge in the international scene. As the Editors remark in their introduction to this issue, MR is in planning stages to facilitate artists exchanges with Mexico, Nebraska, Denmark and Venezuela. A lot of these contacts followed the personal movement of artists working in New York and with MR at the time, not unlike the links that continue to make a mark in the more recent history of MR Exchange programs, like Hungary and Austria. Our feature article is by Sarah Skaggs – A Letter to Florence Flung.

Many of these Journal issues are available for purchase at Movement Research. As always, we welcome your comments at the end of each reprinted article, or at cc@movementresearch.org. We are also posting table of contents for each issue for your reference.

“One can travel many miles and go nowhere at all or walk down Ave A, walk into a studio, and be catapulted warp speed into various dimensions. In traveling we choose our means and the varieties of struggle that best suits us at the time. The seductive thing is feeling we have choices to make.” –from Travel by Wendell Beavers