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.

Reusable Parts/Endless Love

 

The cycle of works known as Reusable Parts/Endless Love is a project that questions how representations of intimacy and narratives of love are produced, re-produced, circulated and exchanged.

This three-part project is realized as a performance installation adapted specifically to the exhibition/performance space; a multi-channel video and audio installation; and a photographic series.

The project began when Gerard and Kelly encountered Tino Sehgal’s Kiss in an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In Kiss a man and a woman perform a slow, languorous embrace. Struck by the ephemerality of the piece and its consistent boy/girl casting, they returned a number of times to learn its choreography. Under the watchful eyes of museum guards, they spoke the couple’s movements into hidden voice-recorders. This resulted in a twelve-minute audio recording of the artists’ observations of the Kiss dancers’ movements in real time. (“His hands on her lower back…her arms around his shoulders…they turn ooooone huuuundred aaaaaaand eiiiiiiiighty deeeeeegrees.”).  Gerard and Kelly used this audio recording as a score for movement in their attempt to reconstruct Kiss with critical differences. The languorous embrace of the couple becomes a series of solo performances, with each dancer enacting both male and female roles on his own body.

Reusable Parts/ Endless Love                       

 <performance installation>

 

Gerard and Kelly, Reusable Parts/Endless Love (2011)

Performance view, Danspace Project, New York, November 2011

 

 

 

Kiss Solo                                                                                 

<video installation>

Gerard and Kelly, Kiss Solo (2011) 

Multiple channel video installation, dimensions variable

Installation view, University of California, Los Angeles, December 2011

 

 

Score in Four Parts                                           

 <photographic series>

Gerard and Kelly

Score in Four Parts (2011) 

Digital chromogenic prints mounted on museum box, 16" x 24"

 

Digital chromogenic prints, mounted on museum box, (4) 16" x 24"

 
Production Credits:

Danspace Project, New York City (November 2011): Performed by Niv Acosta, devynn emory, Yve Laris Cohen, Ryan Kelly, Todd McQuade, Roger Prince, and Jose Tena.  Scenic and lighting designer: Marcus Doshi. Costume designer: Camille Assaf. Sound engineer: Trent Wolbe. Co-production Moving Theater.

University Art Gallery, UC-Irvine (Februrary 2011): Performed by Ryan Kelly, Politeia Le, Todd McQuade, and Jose Tena. Costumes and styling by Aaron Valenzuela. Sound engineering by Trent Wolbe. Co-production Moving Theater.

Video production: Editor: Javo Basques. Camera: Eugene Wasserman.

Moving Theater's programs are made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and from the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State's 62 counties. Moving Theater's 2011-2012 projects are supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Closing Night Performance: Feb 5

Boxes (2010)

Gerard and Kelly in collaboration with Chelsea Knight, Boxes (2010)
Single-channel video, 6 minutes
Production still 
 

 
Production Credits: 
Featuring Benjamin Asriel, Ryan Kelly and Jose Tena
Camera work and Editing by Chelsea Knight

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).

Park Avenue...Shit... (2010)

Gerard and Kelly, Park Avenue...Shit; I'm Still Only in Park Avenue...Every Time I think I'm Gonna Wake Up Back in the Jungle (2010), video still
Single-channel video, 9 minutes
 

 
Production Credits:

Produced by Moving Theater
Edited by Gerard and Kelly with Javier Bosques
Original sound score created by Gerard and Kelly from music composed by Du Yun and Mario Diaz de León
Camera operators Javier Bosques, Devan Mulvaney, and Yaniv Schulman
Featuring Jonathan Drillet, Ryan Kelly, Davon Rainey, Marlène Saldana, Debra Ann Servider, Jose Tena, Anthony Whitehurst, and ICE | International Contemporary Ensemble
Lighting design by Marcus Doshi
Costume design by Camille Assaf-Doshi

The artists gratefully acknowledge Park Avenue Armory (New York, NY) for residency in association with the development of this work. 

Ideological Formation (2010)

 Gerard and Kelly, Ideological Formation (2010) Performance, 20 minutes
Performance still, The Kitchen, New York, June 2010
Pictured: Jose Tena and Ryan Kelly

 

Ideological Formation focuses on the male body as a site of militarization. A surreptitiously recorded audio score notating the movements of a man and a woman kissing accompanies the choreography of three cardboard boxes: dancers reduced to mechanisms? A way to sidestep identity politics? A return of minimalism? Gerard and Kelly explore choreography as a resistance to the regimented demands of masculinity.

    

 

Production Credits:

The Kitchen, New York City (June 2010) and Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa, Lisbon (July 2010):  Performed by Ryan Kelly and Jose Tena

Mount Tremper Arts Festival, New York (August 2010): Performed by Ben Asriel, Ryan Kelly, and Jose Tena

Armory Show (2010)

Gerard and Kelly, Armory Show (2010)
Performance, 75'
Performance still, Park Avenue Armory, New York, February 2010

 

A performance designed for Park Avenue Armory’s landmark rooms, Armory Show is a reflection on questions of history, memory, the epic, and the ephemeral. Combining dance, text, and three musical scores commissioned by Moving Theater, Armory Show is a reverie and revision at the intersection of public and military space.

 

 

Production credits:

Produced by Moving Theater in association with Park Avenue Armory

Performers: Jonathan Drillet, Ryan Kelly, Davon Rainey, Marlène Saldana, Debra Servider, Jose Tena, Anthony Whitehurst
Original music by Nathan Davis, Mario Diaz de León and Du Yun
Performed live by ICE | International Contemporary Ensemble
Producer: Allison Lyman
Production Manager: John Martinez

Production Assistant: Michael Hart
Videographer: Yaniv Schulman
Sound designer: Levy Lorenzo
Lighting designer: Marcus Doshi
Costume designer: Camille Assaf
Assistant Costume designer: Ashley Gardner

Armory Show is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional support provided by American Music Center Live Music for Dance Program, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Moving Theater gratefully acknowledges Park Avenue Armory for residency in association with the development of this work.