Show Category: Dance

Giving sound, lighting, and physical movement equal importance, Lewis’ affective choreographies trouble the site of the theater as well as the body as stable objects for stable meanings. Through her use of color, embodiment, and dramaturgical unruliness, these symbols are twisted with playful abandon. In minor matter, sound travels across musical epochs to arrive at the poetics of the intimate present. Built on the logic of interdependence, the theater’s parts—light, sound, image, and architecture—become entangled with the three performers, giving life to a vibrant social and poetic space. In this work, Lewis turns to the color red, materializing thoughts between love and rage.  Resisting the tyranny of transparency and representationalism, Lewis suggests another space of becoming.

*The performance runs 3 hours, late arrival and re-entry permitted.
 

Emptiness, stillness, and refusal are sources of great creativity to the Brooklyn-based artist, Gillian Walsh. At the core of her work is a love-hate relationship with the medium of dance, a friction that often translates into highly formalist performances which can feel uninviting at first sight. Behind the seemingly hermetic surface of Walsh’s repetitive dances, however, lies a sincere attempt to carve out a new role for dance as an artistic medium to experiment with non-capitalist temporalities and create new spaces for collective experiences.
 

The title of Walsh’s new work, Fame Notions, is an anagram of Yvonne Rainer’s famous No Manifesto (1965), a historic reference to another artist’s attempt to expand the notion of what dance can do. Instead of just criticizing formalist conventions, however, Walsh takes her critique a step further and situates dance’s materialist foundations as inherently alienating.