Critical Correspondence
Mariana Valencia on Dance Circles
Cultivo una rosa blanca, En julio como en enero, Para el amigo sincero Que me da su mano franca. Y para el cruel que me arranca El corazón con que vivo, Cardo ni oruga cultivo: Cultivo la rosa blanca. -Jose Marti (I have a white rose to tend In July as in January; I […]
WXPT: Letter from taisha paggett
Critical Correspondence invites founder of WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees), taisha paggett, to discuss their most recent project, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, a large scale installation and performance platform presented by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) during late October – early December, 2015. As a […]
Biba Bell discusses dance as a promiscuous mode of dwelling
CC co-editor Biba Bell shares an interlude-esque essay that expresses her ongoing project that thinks through the potential of dance to promiscuously move about, mobilize societal limitations, resist capture, and generally infiltrate disciplinary and institutional habits, aka business as usual… crashing the party; escaping the house. Woven throughout her perpetual proposition – “Would you […]
Sarah Maxfield proposes An Alternative
Creator and curator Sarah Maxfield uses poetic structure to explore gentleness in performance.
Lance Gries: The FIFTY Project, part 3 – Mapping and Video Prototype
For his fiftieth birthday, Lance Gries invited fifty dance colleagues, from a twenty-five year career span, from all over the world, to meet him in a studio for a fifty minute dance encounter. The intimacy, immediacy and vulnerability of some of the most beloved dancers and choreographers from New York and Europe is captured in these edited studio sessions. These fifty video documents are presented in a multi-dimensional immersive installation, a visual moving family tree of the New York dance community in a mass choreography of images, personal stories and dancing bodies. Critical Correspondence has teamed up with Lance to host a series of essays and visual documentation of this expansive project. Here, Lance maps the lineage of the fifty project participants through both systems of education and creative affiliations, and shares a prototype for the gallery installation.
Lance Gries: The FIFTY Project, part 2 – Nancy Dalva
For his fiftieth birthday, Lance Gries invited fifty dance colleagues, from a twenty-five year career span, from all over the world, to meet him in a studio for a fifty minute dance encounter. The intimacy, immediacy and vulnerability of some of the most beloved dancers and choreographers from New York and Europe is captured in these edited studio sessions. These fifty video documents are presented in a multi-dimensional immersive installation, a visual moving family tree of the New York dance community in a mass choreography of images, personal stories and dancing bodies. Critical Correspondence has teamed up with Lance to host a series of essays and visual documentation of this expansive project. Here, writer Nancy Dalva discusses the nature, structure and dynamics of duet.
Lance Gries: The FIFTY Project, part 1 – Lance’s essay
For his fiftieth birthday, Lance Gries invited fifty dance colleagues, from a twenty-five year career span, from all over the world, to meet him in a studio for a fifty minute dance encounter. The intimacy, immediacy and vulnerability of some of the most beloved dancers and choreographers from New York and Europe is captured in these edited studio sessions. These fifty video documents are presented in a multi-dimensional immersive installation, a visual moving family tree of the New York dance community in a mass choreography of images, personal stories and dancing bodies. Critical Correspondence has teamed up with Lance to host a series of essays and visual documentation of this expansive project. Here, he discusses the arc of the project in a personal essay.
I Can Only Be Me: Ann Liv Young Plays Sherry by Lizzie Feidelson
As part of this year’s American Realness Festival, held from January 10 through 20 at the Abrons Art Center, performer Ann Liv Young made regular appearances outside the venue in her Sherry Truck, offering free Sherapy and pink lattes. Lizzie Feidelson paid a visit to Sherry on the last evening of the festival. Download a […]
Deborah Hay in Philadelphia
Nicole Bindler, Programs Coordinator at Mascher Space Cooperative in Philadelphia, worked with thefidget space and University of the Arts to create a week of activities around the choreography and teaching of Deborah Hay. Eagerly anticipated, we presented a festival of solo performances spanning 15 years of solo commissions, a week-long workshop for Mascher Artists-in-Residence and UArts students, and Hay’s “Lecture on the Performance of Beauty” at UArts. Gregory Holt, workshop participant, and Nicole Bindler respond to the week of events.
On Clarinda Mac Low’s 40 Dancers do 40 Dances for the Dancers by Scott Thurston
In “40 Dancers do 40 Dances for the Dancers,” at Danspace Project in St. Mark’s Church on September 13-15, performance and installation artist and co-director of Culture Push Clarinda Mac Low assembled nearly 40 performers over the course of three nights to execute all 40 of her artist, composer and performance artist father Jackson Mac Low’s performance-instruction poems from his 1964 collection, “The Pronouns: A Collection of 40 Dances for the Dancers.” The event was a tribute in the form of a “child’s-eye view” of the 1970s avant-garde; an homage both to the Judson era and to Mac Low, who would have been 90 that month. Scott Thurston is currently researching the relationship between innovative poetry and experimental dance practices. As part of this work he traveled to New York City in September to see “40 Dancers,” to interview Sally Silvers and Bruce Andrews, and to take a workshop with Simone Forti.
SHOW/TELL by Christine Shan Shan Hou
In an effort to represent diverse processes and means of reflection, Critical Correspondence asked poet and artist Christine Shan Shan Hou to submit responses to the work she is seeing according to her own creative practices. This is part of our ongoing interest in soliciting alternative materials from the performance community highlighting the intrinsically subjective nature of creation and observation. This page will be updated often as a series in as many parts as can herein be contained.
Judson Church & Its Dance Critics by George Jackson
George Jackson’s 2010 reflection examines the work of Jill Johnston and Allen Hughes, two dance critics who paid early homage to Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Jackson contrasts Jill Johnston’s breathless, energetic writing in the Village Voice with Allen Hughes’ spartan, un-biased prose, published in the New York Times in between years as a music […]
So Common, Hardly Anyone Can Find It: (Soma)tic Poetry with CAConrad by Lizzie Feidelson
CC intern Lizzie Feidelson reflects on the relationship between dance and writing during a (Soma)tic Poetry Workshop, a movement-based writing workshop conducted by Philadelphia-based poet CAConrad in May 2012 as part of Movement Research’s 2012 festival: Push It. Real. Good.
The Score by Clarinda Mac Low
Clarinda Mac Low reflects on dance scores in the second of a series of several writings for CC in 2012, which she has dubbed “The Year of Dance.” Mac Low will be presenting “40 Dancers do 40 Dances for the Dancers” at Danspace Project this September 2012. The piece is based on “The Pronouns: 40 Dances for the Dancers,” a series of dance scores by her father, Jackson Mac Low.
REPRINT: Jill Johnston’s “Democracy,” a Village Voice review of Judson Dance Theater’s historic first performance
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Judson Dance Theater, we are pleased to share a reprint of Jill Johnston’s August 23, 1962 Village Voice review of the very first Judson Dance Theater performance. Johnston’s brief review of performances by Fred Herko, John Herbert McDowell, Ruth Emerson, David Gordon, William Davis and Yvonne Rainer, among others, marks one of the first critical responses to the Judson movement.
