Since its inception in 1990, the Movement Research Performance Journal has fostered the evolution of written and graphic languages that contemplate current issues of dance and performance. Created by and for artists, the journal provides a unique forum for critical, rigorous, and creative exploration of the politics of performance, and seeks to address a multi-disciplinary readership. The journal focuses on artists' of-the-moment concerns, with past issues exploring topics related to gender and sexuality, environments and eco-activism, critical approaches to race and ethnicity, technology and multimedia, Indigenous performance and settler colonial legacies, private property and neoliberal individualism, as well as tactics of liberation and revolt.

How to get the MRPJ

Published two times annually, the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) is distributed for free at all Movement Research classes and events taking place at 122 Community Center, Eden’s Expressway, and Judson Memorial Church.

The current issue is also made available at partnering dance and performance venues and organizations located throughout New York City. If your venue is located in the New York City area and is interested in becoming a free distribution site, please contact [email protected].

Current and past issues are available for purchase outside the NYC metropolitan area and can be shipped nationally and internationally to individuals, institutions, organizations, and businesses, read below for more details.

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Subscribe: Become a 2- or 4-issue subscriber to have the latest issue of Movement Research Performance Journal mailed to you upon publication. Subscription prices vary by mailing destination and between individual and institutional subscribers. To subscribe go to the dropdown menu on the bottom right.

Purchase an In-print Set: In-print sets include all available issues of the Movement Research Performance Journal. The sets includes a total of 24 issues: #3, #5, #14, #15, #19, #20, #22, #32, #33, #38, #40-44, #46-50, #52/ 53-56. The set costs $200, plus shipping. For orders and questions of in-print sets email: [email protected].

Back Issues: Individual copies of past issues are available to order. To learn more, scroll down and click on the corresponding cover image.

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Place a Bulk Order: We offer discounts on bulk orders of a single issue (with graduated discounts for purchasing 25, 50, or 100 copies) to fellow nonprofit organizations and educational institutions around the world so that they can distribute Movement Research Performance Journal to their students, constituents, and artists. Wholesale is also available for bookstores and other for-profit entities or businesses. For bulk orders or wholesale information email: [email protected].

Movement Research offers a variety of advertising opportunities in both Movement Research Performance Journal and through our online, monthly publication Critical Correspondence. Movement Research Performance Journal advertisers have the opportunity to purchase bulk subscriptions at a discounted rate. Learn more >>

​MRPJ Digital Single Copy

Digital Single Copies of Issues 52-56 are available for purchase. The digital MRPJ will be sent through email as a PDF within five business days of the transaction.


Issue#57

Issue 57 of the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) takes up the keyword “work.” Given that Movement Research has a history of being an organization of artists laboring for and with one another, we invited contributors to consider, revise, or push against questions like: how are things working today? What is the condition of labor in the field of dance and performance? What does it mean to be or have a body that works, on which work is (or isn’t) projected? How do idealizations of the laboring body and/or the ethos of collective practice relate to or obscure the lived experience of making dance works, working in dance, or balancing artistic production with the productive demands of one’s so-called “survival job”? To work in dance (or the arts in general) is indisputably to be exploited. But the contributors to this issue both directly and obliquely take up the experience of working as both enervating and energizing (in often contradictory ways), and draw from their different experiences of working work’s uneven distribution across the globe, the abelism that belies work’s regimentation, and the on-going struggle to find solidarity among arts workers.

More than thematically linked, the issue’s three sections also reflect a desire to address how this publication itself asks artists to work. Artist-run since 1990, the burden of administering a publication like the MRPJ was (perhaps) once outweighed by the promise of what this kind of project could do to shape the field of dance and performance. Today, that editorial and administrative labor dovetails all too well with what has become naturalized as an expectation of practicing artists—that they write about what they are doing or want to do in grant applications, that they create content to be used both for educating and marketing to audiences, and that they develop a discourse that signifies the value of their work in relation to any number of fields other than dance.

For Issue 57, the MRPJ editorial team (Josh Lubin-Levy, John Arthur Peetz, and Nicole Bradbury) gave the keyword “work” to three artists designated as “Contributing Editors” (nora chipaumire, Jerron Herman, and Alex Rodabaugh). nora, Jerron, and Alex were each invited to invite three to five other participants to join the discussion but also encouraged to pass on the administrative and editorial labor to the MPRJ staff.

Issue 57 is only the beginning of thinking about how the structure of a journal on and by artists needs to adapt to an era in which content creation exists in overdrive.

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