Benedict Nguyen
Benedict Nguyen is a writer, dancer, and arts advocate currently based in the South Bronx, NY. They're a member of the National Center for Choreography's year-long laboratory on dance writing.
Beyond the title itself, there’s something about the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, running from mid-September 2018 to early February 2019, that brought up meta thoughts about what work I’m doing. What could this writing, this work, do?
For the Whitney, it seems that the newness of Mauss’s perspective as a visual artist looking at ballet’s resonances is one that offers rich potential to create a new artistic form. Particularly, Mauss set out to examine the relationship between modernist ballet and the New York avant-garde visual art world in the 1930s – ’50s.
What about all the artists who don’t register on the curatorial grid? The recently defunct Createquity has published a lot of research on who gets to be an artist and how saturated the field is with aspiring creatives. Many dance makers are finding space to present or perform their own work outside of the usual venues.

