Gerard & Kelly

Looking Back: Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk in Education of the Girlchild (1972).

The iconoclastic performer and artist, Meredith Monk, who challenged notions of musical composition and discipline-specificity when she first emerged in the late 1960s, is making a retrospective glance in “Education of the Girlchild Revisited,” a “reconfiguration” of her 1973 work “Education of a Girlchild, an opera.”  This work, performed as a solo by the artist, is itself a look backwards through the life of an aged woman to her childhood.  In recent years, the 68 year-old artist has spent a lot of time considering the backward reflection that age and mortality provoke.  In 2006 she created “Impermanence,” a multi-disciplinary work that incorporated passages from the diary of her then recently deceased partner of many years.  Monk has said of this time, "There was something raw in my musical response; it puts your entire life in perspective." At the beginning of the process for “Impermanence,” Monk worked with a group of hospice patients. She observed that what was important to them at this significant moment of the end of their lives was the dependability of their old habits.

Back to the Future: Trisha Brown at DTW

Babette Mangolte, Watermotor (1978). Performed and choreographed by Trisha Brown.

“Back to Zero,” the title Trisha Brown gave to a cycle of works that includes two of the dances on this program--Foray Forêt (1990) and For M.G.: The Movie (1991)--seems fitting for this moment, in Brown’s practice and perhaps more generally in contemporary art (inclusive of dance), of retrospective beginnings. The uncanny and productive thing about this temporality of looking back as a way of moving forward is its potential to unearth discoveries on supposedly well-trodden ground.

For the past three years, Brown has devoted herself to restaging many of her early works. In celebration of her company’s fortieth anniversary, the 2010-2011 season features performances of works not seen in New York in decades—from the restaging this past fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art of Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), a task-based equipment piece whose title says it all, to the re-creation of Roof Piece(1971) this coming spring at the High Line. Tonight’s performance marks the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s debut at Dance Theater Workshop.  And for the first time, Watermotor (1978), a signature solo indelibly linked to Brown’s own body and movement style, will be performed by someone other than the dance’s maker.

Tere O’Connor: Not a Patriarch, but a Conceptual Artist All the Same

Daniel Clifton and Matthew Rogers in Tere O'Connor's Wrought Iron Fog (2009).

Catch-all phrases tend to flash up to describe Tere O’Connor’s work: masterful, technical, traditional, artisanal, abstract, structural, and most telling, “not conceptual.”  Claudia LaRocco, writing recently for The New York Times, went out of her way to partition O’Connor from his younger peers in dance.  She postulated that O’Connor’s work remained “rigorously movement-focused” at a time when many choreographers are placing themselves in a broader context of “conceptually driven live art and multimedia projects.”

Hoghe’s History

  

Raimound Hoghe cares deeply about history—the history of divas, the history of dance, the history of pop culture, and the history of politics. His works investigate the poetics of memory: how we remember, how easily we forget, how often

Hoghe’s own history as an artist is remarkable.  He worked throughout the 1980s as a critic and dramaturge with Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, a position that presumably required him to provide a literary context for the world-renown choreographer’s often baffling dance-theater images.  Though the intricacies of any collaboration are left outside of history, a dramaturge typically collaborates with a choreographer by asking her questions aimed at unveiling the driving forces behind a work.  (Collections of Hoghe’s writings as a dramaturge with Bausch have been published in several languages though not yet in English).