Trisha Brown’s Accumulation is set to the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band,” a song that itself is expressly referential to its bluegrass and Americana influences. This piece, along with two (Spanish Dance, 1973 and Line Up, 1976) set to Bob Dylan’s version of the Gordon Lightfoot tune “Early Mornin’ Rain,” stands stark against the rest of Brown’s early work of the 1960s and ’70s: a silent, site-specific era.

 

In June, when the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic really sunk in for the dance community, a new wave of selective police brutality drew and riveted global attention on a second pandemic: rampant racism. It was then that Charmaine Warren, with Kimani Fowlin and Nicholas Hall, founded Black Dance Stories (BDS). Every Thursday evening Black dance artists shared their stories in a public Zoom forum.

With the world’s stages dark, this month’s Rail dance section looks at dance from a distance. Our writers explore dance as a salve for isolation, how dance bears up as streamed performance video, podcasts on the art of dancemaking, choreographies of dancing together, apart. Dance, for the individual and for the collective, has been a source of healing and human connection since time immemorial. I hope these pieces remind and inspire us to find new ways to support the dance community in this time of need.

Dance as a form of perseverance and resistance is not just the stuff of movies. Tatjana Barbakoff, a now much-forgotten historical figure, did just that, at great personal risk. Like Rosie, Barbakoff danced as long as she could in the face of hate during the Holocaust. A dancer from Russia (now Latvia) of Jewish and Chinese descent, Barbakoff moved to Germany and had a successful career performing throughout literary cabarets and theaters in the 1920s and early ’30s.

As 2019 draws to a close, this section dedicates a number of its pages to the Bauhaus centennial. The Bauhaus legacy has stood the test of time, not least because of its principle of inclusion; its multi-disciplinary and egalitarian values saw dance and performance integrated into its design practice.

Audience members wait in the entrance of the townhouse (now run as cultural space by the nonprofit 1014) before filing in to a back room. Hassabi’s FIGURES (2019) unfolds. “51, 52,” a projected voice counts as four dancers move subtly between twisted sculptural poses. The harsh fluorescent light overhead cancels what warm tones would have been offered by the ornate, wood molding.

As an admitted Francophile, I’m always drawn to the FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line festival. But as this year’s programming continues to prove this is not la francophilie de votre grand-mere. (If you want Bordeaux and brie in berets by the Seine… who can blame you, but this is not that kind of party).

Dance artist Mariana Valencia wants to leave breadcrumbs for her biographer. “I’m not sure who will write a history about me so I’m starting now to help them have good notes.

In 1920, when women won the right to vote in America, Martha Graham was 24. Graham was performing in the early modern dance group Denishawn and developing her own pelvis-driven movement style that would become the core of her company.

MoMA’s exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done marks a major expansion in the recognition of postmodern dance history. The museum has been steadily collecting and presenting work from the Judson period of the early 1960s, and with this exhibition, rallies and assembles the dances, films, and ephemera in one place.

Olinghouse is the founder/director of The Portal Project, a living archives initiative dedicated to the transmission of performance through archival and curatorial frameworks. Identifying footage that would represent new entry points into Brown’s early work, Olinghouse and renowned video artist Charles Atlas collaborated to create the installation for MoMA. Gillian Jakab sat down with Olinghouse at MoMA

In her book-length poems Claudia Rankine weaves together highly personal anecdotes with collective memories of politicized events and popular culture: an inadvertent racist comment, the vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin, Zidane’s head-butt in the 2006 World Cup—these are the fodder for her filters.

The annual outdoor Battery Dance Festival is like a show-and-tell of the company’s tireless international activity, the Dancing to Connect program. Battery Dance’s new and old friends from these ten countries on four continents were made the old-fashioned way—by asking them to dance.

Gillian Jakab sat down at the Breuer with Met Assistant Curator Brinda Kumar and Choreographer Andrea Miller to discuss the intersections of the exhibition and performance.

Classically trained in dance, Pirici expanded her work to experimental and site-specific practices in the styles of Tino Sehgal and Jérôme Bel over the last several years in Europe. She’s garnered attention in the European art world and only this past fall confronted New York audiences with her piece Threshold: a chain of performers in a human barrier—or portal—at the gate that separates the eastern and western Rail Yards on the Highline. Co-natural traces its roots back to other earlier projects—If You Don’t Want Us, We Want You and Leaking Territories, among others—in which performers stand on site and embody the poses of historical monuments, challenging their static authority.