ROUNDTABLE 2: DANCE AND POLITICS: WHAT REALLY MATTERS.
Thursday, December 2nd 6-8pm
Moderated by Andre Lepecki
Invited Guests: Ralph Lemon (Choreographer) and Sarah Mitchelson (Choreographer/ Dancer)

Gallatin Dean's Conference Room 6th Floor, 715 Broadway.

[Total Attendance: 24]

Guest Artists: Ralph Lemon and Sarah Michelson

Artist Bios

Ralph Lemon

Cross Performance Inc., founded in 1985 by choreographer/director Ralph Lemon, is dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. Lemon works in collaboration with dancers, musicians, composers, media artists, writers, visual artists and actors. Projects are interrelated in their references to Ralph Lemon's choreographic history and their potential for stretching traditional boundaries of dance. While Lemon is the catalyst for these projects, each collaborator contributes his or her knowledge and experience of what is possible in their media along with their creative vision and spirit. Recent Cross Performance projects include works for the stage, published books, visual art installations, and media projects in video, film, DVD and for the Internet.

Sarah Michelson

Choreographer Sarah Michelson transforms performance spaces in the most extraordinary ways. For Part I of Shadowmann at the Kitchen, she spun the large black-box theater around so that the traditional arrangement of audience and performance was reversed. Bleachers were set up onstage, and the tall entrance doors provided the back wall. At the beginning of the performance, lights went up instead of down, the doors to the Kitchen swung open instead of shut, and all the way, across the street, two spotlit dancers in bright yellow tunics walked in unison down three steps of the building opposite and danced, in small side-to-side motions, into the performance space itself.

The Manchester-born and-bred Michelson and her dancers Parker Lutz, Mike Iveson, Tanya Uhlmann, Greg Zuccolo, Jennifer Howard, and Paige Martin are ensemble players attuned to one another's body shapes, movement styles, and breathing patterns. Their quite different abilities give the work a fantastic homemade quality, as though a group of friends had set up an impromptu concert in Hanna Schygulla's studio apartment at three in the morning. Talking, whether to each other or to themselves, sometimes in German (the work was conceived in Germany while they were on tour), the dancers appear to be improvising when in fact they are not.

Moderator: Andre Lepecki, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts

Participants

NYU Professors

1. RoseLee Goldberg, Steinhardt School of Education
2. Tom Bender, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
3. Carol Martin, Tisch School of the Arts
4. Barbara Rose Haum, School of Arts and Sciences
5. Lynn Gumpert, Director of Gray Gallery
6. Nancy Regaldo, French Department
7. Julie Malnig, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
8. Sharon Friedman, Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Graduate Students

1. Rachel Bowditch, Graduate Student Coordinator, PhD Candidate Performance Studies
2. Ayanna Williams,  MA in Performance Studies
3. Joe Shahadi, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies
4. Beth Kurkjian, PhD Candidate, Performance Studies
5. Leigh Keiser, MA in Performance Studies
6. Jonathan Berger, MA Steinhardt School of Education
7. Anthony Clune, undergraduate, Steinhardt School of Education
8. Victoria Anderson, PhD Candidate, Performance Studies
9. Aaron Glass, PhD Candidate, Anthropology
10. Jenn Joy, PhD Candidate, Performance Studies
11. Gillian Lipton, PhD Candidate, Performance Studies

Attendees from other Institutions

1. Jessica O’Grady Marsh, independent artist
2. Katherine Profeta, independent artist
3. Wiebke Arke, Performa Intern

Themes:

The aim of the session, Dance & Politics: What Really Matters moderated by Andre Lepecki was to bring together various choreographers to shed a light on current perspectives in contemporary dance reflecting on the past, present and future. Involving an interdisciplinary gathering of faculty and graduate students from NYU and invited guests, it is our intention to explore new forms and definitions of performance in contemporary art and culture.

Main Points/Questions/Issues Raised:

• Dance as political protest: Andre discusses the history of displacement: Influenced by first generation of dancers in Portugal in the 1980s after fascist regime.
• In what ways are “still” dancers accused of “betraying” dance in terms of the obligation, and social contract to dance as movement? Lepecki is interested in the breach of stillness in dance.
• Can dance ever avoid politics?
• What matters for choreographers today?
• Ralph Lemon acknowledges that politics is inherent in dance, but is interested in its nothingness.
• Ralph’s works: Ralph retraced 1961 Freedom bus ride 40 years later making  all the stops and performed inconspicuous movements in the bus stops.
• Geography project: Question role of narrative in dance: Ralph is interested in creating a web of textual information as part of process and going back to something he thought was historical, i.e. He chose 1930 Arna Bauntum story.  Informed by “the Mirror”, by Andrei Tarkovsky he is interested in dance outside of US and Africa such as Haiti- trance dancing.
• What is the relationship between dance and performance art?
• Sarah Michelson is interested in form and formula: relation between herself and the formula and the audience and formula.  Resisting dance as entertainment: why is dance unpopular? Unpopularity of curatorial work?  Once it is popular, it fails replication. She feels that although the music industry formula is successful, for dance formularity is unsuccessful. There is something diminutive about the form she is involved in: formulaic (acceptance of versions of movement (modern, etc), and presentation of a concert of dance.  She compares the experience of going to a museum and viewer being opened to learning and not a critic to going to a dance and viewers having a different mentality, being judgmental, and how performers seek approval from audience (applause, etc).
• What is the relationship between economy and creativity?
• Why is dance not liked? How can dance become popular again?