“Marking Dance” on Display Through Oct. 18 The exhibition “Marking Dance: Documents from Judson Memorial Church, 1958-1968,” currently on display at the Fales Collection of New York University, will be celebrated with a discussion and reception on Monday, October 7, 6:30 p.m. The event, which takes place in Fales, 3rd floor of the NYU Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South, will feature choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer and exhibition curator and dance scholar MJ Thompson. The evening is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. Call (212) 998-6991.
“Marking Dance” features over 80 pieces from the Judson Memorial Church archive, which is held at Fales, and includes posters, flyers, programs, photographs, administrative documents, and artists’ scores. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m.- 5 p.m.; Friday by appointment only. For further information call (212) 998-2596.
The term Judson Dance Theatre has generally referred to those dancers/choreographers who took part in Robert Dunn’s composition class between 1960 and 1962 and later made work at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. Among them were Trisha Brown, Judith Dunn, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, David Gordon, Simone (Forti) Morris, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer and Elaine Summers. For the end-of-year concert in 1962, Rainer and Paxton approached the Reverend Al Carmines at Judson Memorial Church to inquire about a performance space, and the first concert happened on June 6 of that year.
“Making Dance” offers an alternate chronology to the history of Judson Dance Theatre by underscoring the central role played by the Church in creating a physical and intellectual space where dance artists could experiment. As a religious institution, the Church maintained a commitment to social activism and community service; and as an arts presenter, it advocated freedom of expression more broadly. The exhibition is an attempt to understand the traces of dancerly invention at Judson by moving between the archives of Judson Dance Theatre, Judson Poet’s Theatre, Judson Gallery and the Church itself.
According to the curator, the cross-pollination between disciplines, the range of political viewpoints, and the diversity of aesthetics represented, from the minimal to the baroque, from pure dance to stunning theatricality, is astonishing.
The Fales Collection of English and American literature comprises more than 200,000 rare volumes and numerous manuscripts. DeCoursey Fales established The Fales Collection at NYU in 1957 with a gift of his personal library of 50,000 volumes, given in memory of his father, Haliburton Fales. The Fales Collection is especially renowned for its Downtown Collection, which documents the Downtown New York art and literary scene from 1975 to the present. Fales, located on the 3rd floor of Bobst Library, is also home to NYU Libraries’ special collections, among them the Brownstone Collection of American Cookery and the Richard Maass collection of Revolutionary and Colonial documents, as well as the personal papers of Erich Maria Remarque and E. L. Doctorow, and the Alfred C. Berol Collection of Lewis Carroll, the largest Carroll collection in the United States.