This issue is OUT OF PRINT.
EDITORS’ LETTERS
Many may ask out of excitement rather than shock – “Why DANCE-NOISE?” It seems that many, like myself, were tired of walking out of performances and quipping, “Yeah, but haven’t you seen DANCENOISE?” You can’t see them here, but hopefully, you can get a sense of their tremendous influence and, like the rest of us, get in line for that next full-evening show that Mike Iveson warns us about. Along with Mike, we have some mighty distinguished writers in the portfolio. Thank you to all of them and to Leslie Satin for bringing it all together.
We also have a couple of new editors joining us this round. Milka Djordjevich and Sarah Beth Percival worked on the 30/30 Part 2 Anniversary Portfolio, and Matthew Lyons, curator at The Kitchen, has developed a new series based on a conversation between those notorious twins separated at birth: the black box and the white cube.
Thank you to Clarinda MacLow and everyone who worked on #34. We have a new team in place, still anchored by our Graphic Designer Troy Lambert, now joined by our new Production Editor Timothy Murray and our new in-house Production Manager Rebecca Brooks. AND a big thank you to our Intern, Freddy Mancilla.
All the best,
Trajal
This issue of Movement Research Performance Journal takes an unusual step: its Portfolio re-visits the work of two performers whose long-time joint project largely came to a close over a decade ago. In 1983, Lucy Sexton and Anne Iobst arrived in New York and began inventing themselves as DANCENOISE. For the next fourteen years, they were a vibrant element of the downtown dance and performance art scene. Granted, those words sound way too polite for a duo whose events were slippery with (stage) blood, crammed with props (baby-dolls, cleavers, dummies, trash), and costumes (discount-store glamour wigs and fur and fishnets – or nothing at all except high-heeled pumps), and clamorous with pop music and original and appropriated language (TV commercials, soap operas, dramatic literature – whatever was on their minds). Evolved from a wide range of performance traditions – dance and performance art, of course, but clowning and skit comedy and variety theater, too – their work was politically confrontational and aesthetically disruptive, ranting about sociopolitical ills and offenses, and skewering cultural clichés in collages whose tone writer Dennis Cooper once described as “playfully brutalist.”
MR’s choice to feature DANCENOISE didn’t arise from nostalgic impulses – though it was a pleasure to bask again in the vaudeville excess and the anti-academic feminism – but from the realization that Lucy’s and Anne’s ideas and strategies are germane, and evident, today. When DANCENOISE first took their clothes off, made messes, and waved hundreds of red flags, they had a context of clubs, punk, and 1980s performance art. They continued the legacy of Happenings, Fluxus, and Judson, but they were still new, hilarious, surprising, and sometimes even shocking. In contemporary dance and performance, explorations of gender, sexuality, and the meanings of the body predominate: through talking and stripping and writing, through neo-burlesque and disrupted formalism, through the vulnerability and the bravado of nudity.
I am grateful for the opportunity to return to DANCENOISE and reconsider its work, especially now, in a time of economic and political turmoil demanding that artists create opportunities for intervention, examination, stimulation, and contemplation. (Aside: how will the promise of Obama’s presidency meet the needs of art and artists?) I want to thank all of the contributors to the DANCENOISE Portfolio: the colleagues and friends who reflected on their on- and off-stage experiences with Lucy and Anne, the journalists whose critiques describe and elucidate DANCENOISE performances and their positioning in the cultural landscape, the photographers whose images vividly recall the sights and the gestalt of these events and their creators, and Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton, who spent considerable time with me thinking through their complex and wonderful work.
Best,
Leslie Satin
