abstraction and aboutness in dance
For a week, at the end of an extaordinary year, six dance and performance artists come together to contemplate dance’s aboutness and it’s legacies of abstraction. Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation (1966) and Miguel Gutierrez’s Does Abstraction Belong to White People? (2018) will be (re)read as a collective starting point for this lab.
The history of western experimental dance in the 20th century moved through dances that were meant to be legible, dances that were meant to be felt, dances that were purposely opaque, dances that prized simplicity or complexities, dances that were about what they said they were about and dances in which the makers were unable to go beyond their own cultural inheritances to see what was being reproduced. The group takes this week together for a moving research asking where are we now, both individually and collectively, after Modern, Post-Modern, Conceptual Dance and Performance, what are we not yet aware of, and what do we wish for ourselves and our dancing, moving, embodying communities?
is a choreographer and performer who tends to think of her dances as an intersection of geographies, histories, mythologies, ecologies, and archeologies but is aware that that intersection may be abstract. Some of the performance festivals and venues she has been presented by include the Kitchen (NYC), Movement Research at the Judson Church (NYC), Disjecta (Portland), Pieter PASD (LA), Tanzquartier (Vienna), steirischer herbst (Graz), ANA (Copenhagen), and Trinosophes (Detroit).
Credits
With Elizabeth Ward, Alix Eynaudi, Yoh Morishita, Perel, Jasmin Hoffer, Samuel Feldhandler, Mzamo Nondlwana