Madison Mainwaring
MADISON MAINWARING trained with the Rock School of the Pennsylvania Ballet. Her writing and criticism has been featured by Lapham's Quarterly, The American Reader, BOMB, and the Fjord Review. She lives in Manhattan.
Make 'Em Laugh
by Madison MainwaringFEB 2019 | Dance
Having never seen Nederlands Dans Theater, I was worried its junior troupe, NDT 2, might be a little too “European” for my liking—one of those avant-garde four-hour-long productions you go to against your better judgment in Paris, in which art is less about pleasure than it is a test of “intellectual” endurance.
THE BODY IN PIECES
Zoe | Juniper Examines Myths of Memory and Identity
by Madison Mainwaring
FEB 2015 | Dance
In BeginAgain, wizard art team Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey set the stage with a woman on the ground in a full-body cast. She isn’t alone for long. As soon as the dancing starts, she’s joined by a dizzying array of doubles and simulacrums. Two women appear in matching gray shifts, their hair in girlish plaits on top of their heads.
THE NAKED SKELETON
Some Notes on the Danse Macabre
by Madison Mainwaring
APR 2015 | Dance
However slow the dance, a certain vitality is required of the dancer. Anyone with technique-based training has the musculature of a professional athlete, and must be in robust health in order to perform. An aura of spontaneity surrounds the cultural attitude toward dancing: social dances take place at celebratory functions, and people who call themselves “fun-loving” will say that they like to dance, too. Stepping in time to a rhythm is generally thought to be a life-affirming gesture, and a hop-skip counts as an unequivocal statement of joy.
The Body as Semi-transparent Envelope1
by Madison MainwaringOCT 2014 | Dance
Christiana Axelsen might not be the first dancer that your eye catches in a crowd. All of her gestures have a rounded, softened edge, and they flow without dramatic pause or emphasis.
Singing clear through a forest of signs: On Bill T. Jones’s Story/Time, the performance and the book
by Madison MainwaringNOV 2014 | Dance
However “cool” the form, Jones could never really belong to the rest of the post-structuralist dance scene and its disdain for direct story-telling. The way in which his work drew from real life experience was made all too clear for those looking for conceptualisms.
Game Plan: Lucinda Childs’s Early Works (1963 – 1978)
by Madison MainwaringDEC 18-JAN 19 | Dance
Lucinda Childs’s dances fall together as if they’ve been arranged by a divine mathematician, the same one who set the Fibonacci sequence into snail shells and fractals in the forest’s leaves.
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
A Marriage Of Styles In Baroque’d
by Madison Mainwaring
MAR 2015 | Dance
The “baroque” is generally associated with poor taste and bad politics. We think of Versailles and the courtiers powdering their wigs with flour as people died of starvation on the streets. It might be surprising to learn that the excessive aesthetic of the baroque actually started in the populist tradition, when in 1563 the Catholic church declared that artists needed to make an effort to reach a common audience. Standards of form and genre were to be trumped for a more spontaneous, individualistic expression of the human voice. The tragicomedy became a hit. I
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
Rashaun Mitchell’s Light Years
by Madison Mainwaring
MAY 2015 | Dance
There is this great thing that can happen when you are staying in the countryside, far away from any source of light pollution. It’s mid-July. The heat stays sticky even after dark, and so you decide to walk to a nearby lake in order to cool off a bit before heading to bed. When you reach the lake, you find that the clear night sky—no moon, just the stars—is reflected in the water.
Additional Dancers of Note
by the Rail's Dance SectionOCT 2014 | Dance
A note from the Editor: In the same spirit of the Music section’s Undiscovered Lands, we’ve dedicated October to dancers who we believe deserve greater recognition. Spotlighted here are 16 artists who have captivated us with their virtuosity and inventiveness, their vulnerability and grace. By no means an exhaustive list, we’re excited to begin the conversation.
APPARITION OF A FACE IN A CROWD
Eiko’s First Solo Performance In Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station
by Madison Mainwaring
DEC 14-JAN 15 | Dance
I asked Eiko Otake to describe her latest work, A Body in a Station, which took place this past October in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. “One woman comes into the station, walks around, lies down, watches people and is watched by them, then leaves,” she said in reply.
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