Movement Research announces Issue 56 of its publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. This issue continues the journal’s legacy of experimenting with approaches that engage contemporary choreography and performance through the medium of print, including poem, prose, image, interview, and a wide range of other formats. It is also the second installment of the project “no before no after,” conceived by Joshua Lubin-Levy and mayfield brooks.
Our preceding issue asked over twenty contributors to respond to the question: how do you make a journal dedicated to, but in the absence of, live performance? Their responses were shaped by the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, but also by the global Black Lives Matter movement under which conversations about “liveness” took on new urgencies. In the ensuing years, as performances venues have both shuttered and pressured artist to return to “normal,” the brutal calculus of the art economy demanding that the show go on has been exposed. At the same time, many within those venues have worked to catalyze utopian practice that reshape the field of performance through the ways we work together and what we are working towards. Issue 56 takes up both trajectories—questioning the pull of normalcy and shedding light on the practices helping others reimagine navigate this postlapsarian condition.
