Thanks for getting in touch. RoseLee asked me to post the below for her, and I’ll just add that we hope you’ll all be able to join us for the symposium that we’re having on the 17th, “NOT FOR SALE: Dance and Conceptual Art in Visual Arts,” to continue the conversation.

Hope to see you at some PERFORMA07 events very soon!
Lana

Dear Lana

I’ve been enjoying the blogs which I’ve been reading on my way from one venue to another this past week. Wish that Chase, Jonah, Claudia et al could join me en route! Would be a great way to continue the conversation which is indeed ongoing, including a panel on conceptual choreography Thursday at PSi with DD Dorvillier and others, another with Yvonne Rainer and Isaac Julien on Friday, and a long conversation with Jerome Bel yesterday afternoon about dance coming out of the visual art world, which I hope we can publish in our next book to share with everyone. I simply haven’t had a moment to respond, but certainly look forward to doing so once PERFORMA 07 winds down. Clearly we should all get together to discuss further; would be a most exciting gathering.

Thrilled that the doors and windows have indeed been opened. One can certainly sense the air circulating.

Please post this for me as is, since I’m not sure how to enter it in the blog!

Off to watch Cooper Union students setting up Allan Kaprow’s Fluids, then to Chinatown for The Long March.

See you there!

RoseLee

As for the trend of genre crossover itself, it makes sense that it has a cyclical appearance in art, and the fact that Judson happened doesn’t make it any less necessary to question form now. It’s certainly human nature to codify experience and make frames for things, but those frames can create such a semiotic short-cut that we stop paying attention to the detail of what we’re actually experiencing.

I think that’s why there’s such a trend of cross-disciplinary performance right now. We’re trying to make things that have to be looked at because we’re not sure what they are. We can’t dismiss them quickly by saying, “Oh, that’s dance, or that’s theater, or that’s a painting, or that’s a beer commercial. I know what that is, so I don’t have to engage further with it.” If cross-disciplinary work keeps moving towards becoming its own marketed genre controlled by a curatorial authority, it will lose its power to engage that investigation, and we’ll all be on to something else, (something else that will become the new under-funded edge of the market).

Yes, as Miguel pointed out, dancers might (shd do a poll about this) be able to name more visual artists than viz peeps could name choreographers. But when I migrated to the experimental playwriting circles, I can’t tell you how many dancers stared at me blankly when I said I was studying with Mac Wellman. Likewise my playwright friends haven’t heard of Tere O’Connor. But hey, lots of young dancers haven’t heard of Bebe Miller.

What I find exciting however is that people’s strategies of making work are converging, whether or not we all know about it yet.

I just went to my first performa event tonight. I’ll be posting abt it, which should turn up on the blog within a few days. I’ll try to put an opinion post up too (we have two categories of opinion and review) with a link to this conversation.

I am truly excited about much of the work that will be presented in Performa, as are many of my dance-making peers. I also wish that interest and curiosity in the work of visual artists and European choreographers were a bit more reciprocal. I also find it simplistic to talk about the period of the 60’s and 70’s as THE period of experimentation in contemporary dance. I see a fetishization of this moment in the history of NY experimental dance, and I sometimes wonder if the blessing of the wealthier art world on the dance scene at that time is why it remains so visible today. Trisha Brown AND Robert Rauschenberg for example. I’m not at all claiming the dance artists were riding on coattails of the visual artists as I deeply respect and admire that generation of dance makers and find them incredibly inspiring. I’m just questioning the mythologization of that moment in history and the inabillity of people in positions of power and the promotion of contemporary work to acknowledge or identify the concerns and ideas of ny choreographers working today, or even the development of the form here for the last 20 years.

I sometimes feel, though contemporary choreographers are often interested in examining the notions of “performance” and “performativity” in a way that shares a lot of commom concerns as visual artists working with performance, that dance still exists inside of institutional structures that follow more of an entertainment, “show business” model, particularly in the US. Though the institutions here in ny are constantly responding to artists and changing in very positive ways these days, there is still this dinosaur of a structure to contend with. I keep thinking there is so much work made by my peers and many of the people you listed above that would be much more at home among an audience of people familiar with the work of people like Marina Abramovicz or Markus Schinwald, eg. rather than the audiences of Complexions or Paul Taylor. I think its a very complex issue (certainly involving economic issues and the lack of marketable products or objects in dance) but I wish there would be more opportunities for the visibility of a very alive body of work amogst contemporary ny choreographers, and I don’t think PERFORMA had addressed that.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2007/11/02#segment88190

I do want to quickly say that I am excited about many of the performances that are part of PERFORMA and hope to attend quite a few. But if some people think that PERFORMA is about visual artists working with performance, why then is the work of many choreographers ( from the 60s or from Europe) being shown?

i do think it is successful as a “biennial of visual art performance” (which it uses as a sort of subtitle)

although some performing artists are included, the festival focuses on performance by visual artists … not so much performing artists collaborating with visual artists, or performing artists working with visual arts, or any of the other permutations you referred to in your list. i dunno… is RoseLee Goldberg serious about crossover being a part of performa’s mission?

and I honestly think ignorance is probably the biggest issue here — I’ve seen RoseLee a lot at BAM, but not even once at smaller venues (although who knows – maybe we have opposite schedules). i just don’t think she knows what emerging experimental new york artists are up to these days.

anyway, I’d love for you to put your thoughts in a letter to Ms. Goldberg & LaRocco…

and lastly: i’m so glad we have performa. i’m so glad we have this discussion.

I am a choreographer who, funny enough, has a double degree in visual and media art (not dance), and I run an arts space where mixed disciplines can slip, combine, talk to one another, or explode if needed: http://www.chezbushwick.net

Referring to the 1960s and 1970s as a hotbed of experimentation may be valid, but as a lens for where dance might exist today, this is simply not rigorous enough. To use the same canonical references, repeatedly, is the actual parochialism at play here.

It is a hectic provincialism to say that dance and visual art do not crossover today. In addition to the list represented above, it is equally frustrating (yet typical) to see the 1960s as the cut-off period for this discussion. I am speaking from the perspective of having Merce Cunningham and Robert Wilson as primary employers: these artists are still ahead of their time, and yet align with (or pre-date) many of the time periods in question above. But while these artists’ work is far more visual than what may now be in vogue, they are dismissed as known quantities that could never act as forces of the avant-garde today. Cunningham’s pioneering work with motion capture, 3D animation as a tool to visually animate dance, costume-as-prosthesis, and even his hand-made drawings (which are shown in galleries, as Wilson’s work is represented by Paul Cooper Gallery) are but a few examples.

So: if up and coming generations of dance artists AND older established masters are being marginalized by this discussion, that’s quite astonishing. And I think we have a lot of work to do.

I’d also like to bring attention to a show coming up called “A Choreographed Exhibition,” which brings 8 choreographers into the gallery space of Kunsthalle St. Gallen for a presentation of choreography in a visual art context. Curated by Mathieu Copeland, who also curated a show for PERFORMA, the exhibit includes the following people:

Fia Backstrom
Jonah Bokaer
Philippe Egli
Karl Holmqvist
Jennifer Lacey
Roman Ondak
Michael Parsons
Michael Portnoy

Lastly, to open this up even further, the curatorial team at PERFORMA is very responsive to feedback, and they call artists personally to discuss dance programming, film programming, etc.

RoseLee Goldberg, Debra Singer, and Claudia La Rocco should be contacted and brought into the discussion, because their perspectives have been addressed.