Issue #34
Winter 2009
This issue of Movement Research Performance Journal takes an unusual step: its Portfolio re-visits the work of two performers whose long-time joint project largely came to a close over a decade ago. In 1983, Lucy Sexton and Anne Iobst arrived in New York and began inventing themselves as DANCENOISE. For the next fourteen years, they were a vibrant element of the downtown dance and performance art scene. Granted, those words sound way too polite for a duo whose events were slippery with (stage) blood, crammed with props (baby-dolls, cleavers, dummies, trash) and costumes (discount-store glamour-wigs and fur and fishnets-or nothing at all except high-heeled pumps), and clamorous with pop music and original and appropriated language (TV commercials, soap opera, dramatic literature, whatever was on their minds). Evolved from a wide range of performance traditions – dance and performance art, of course, but clowning and skit comedy and variety theater, too – their work was politically confrontational and aesthetically disruptive, ranting about sociopolitical ills and offenses and skewering cultural clichés in collages whose tone writer Dennis Cooper once described as “playfully brutalist.”
Editorial team
Articles
Editor’s Letters
Many may ask out of excitement rather than shock – “Why DANCENOISE?” It seems that many like myself were tired of walking out of performances and quipping, “yea, but haven’t...
News
CHOREOGRAPHER/CREATOR AWARDS Back to Back Theater, for Small Metal Objects at the Whitehall Ferry Terminal Nora Chipaumire, for Chimurenga at Dance Theater Workshop Doug Elkins, for Fraulein Maria at Joe’s...
Editorial: Remembering Burt Supree
Burt Supree worked as a writer and dance editor for the Village Voice from 1976-1992, when he died at the age of 51 from a heart attack. A generation later,...
Back Cover
Focus on the Work: Eszter Salamon
Trajal: So tell me where do you live and work these days? Eszter: I live in Berlin since 2001. I work mainly in Germany, France and Belgium. I most often...
Stolen ARTicle
At a distance of 18,000 km from the Earth, the elephant Würsa could balance on her trunk. It is on the basis of learned scientific calculations that Daniel Firman reached...
Philadelphia: Show Must Go On!
This past September, having seen and loved Jérôme Bel’s Pinchet Klunchun and Myself a year ago, my friend Ben and I trekked down to Philadelphia to see Bel's The Show...
Criticism: Nudity, Nakedness, Otherness and a still difficult spectator
This article discusses the distinction between nudity and nakedness, perceiving the former as a performative event of the latter. It analyzes the spectator difficulties in viewing the naked human body....
Sweet and Tender Tehran
When I told people I was going to Iran for a month to dance and perform, I was either met with confusion, concern for my safety, or envy. The first...
Cover Artist Portfolio: DANCENOISE
Hi Leslie, I am sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you. Also I hope you don’t take offense to the way I am going to...
Interview: Leslie Satin and Lucy Sexton
LESLIE SATIN: Let’s start with the very early days of DANCENOISE, or even before you were DANCENOISE. I know that you and Annie met at Ohio University, and that you...
Family Affair
Untitled By Hilton Als There are certain images – indelible moments – that always come back to me, generally when I’m drifting off to sleep, and sometimes they’re images of...
They Stripped with their Boots On: Revenge with Reprieve
DANCENOISE appeared as if out of nowhere, yet their presence registered as if they had always been with us; reliable, inevitable, understood. They worked during that rarified decade – roughly...
Pogo-ing in the age of DANCENOISE: a Personal Testimony
I’m no historian; I don’t remember exact titles and dates and places. When thinking of my life in The Age of DANCENOISE, images come tumbling in a jumbled randomness –...
Reprint: The Bare Essentials of Dance
I remember that night in ’85 when I first stumbled into a DANCENOISE show at 8BC and recognized the energy of some wild-in-the-streets girlhood: the black bras and combat boots;...
Montpelier: 6mil
From July to December 2008, nine artists lived and worked together at the National Choreographic Center in Montpellier, France, brought together by an invitation pyramid starting with the project initiators...
Centerfold: International Festival
Tor Lindstrand: Denzel Washington plays a drug lord that sort of ruled Harlem and ruled the whole heroine traffic in this part of the US for a almost a decade....
Production Meeting: The Pleasure of Stillness
Sally Gross: I find it very hard to talk about something that’s happened when I’m in the midst of something else that’s happening. There are some things, of course, that...
BLACK BOX/WHITE CUBE: luciana achugar and Mai-Thu Perret
At a time when choreographers are increasingly exploring dance at its limits and with the recent focus on live work within the visual arts system, this new series pairs a...
Featured Artist Performance Calendar
luciana achugar 10 Jan, 5:30 & 8 pm, The Sublime is Us, Dance Theater Workshop, New York, NY 30 Apr - 2 May, A Super Natural Return to Love, Walker...
Next Issue
ChameckiLerner John Scott Pepatian and Out of La Negrura The Body Cartography Project and Practicable
Festival or Not: Prisma, Politics of Ecstasy, In-Presentable
Performance Journal: Where did the idea for Prisma come from? Montserrat Payró: Well, Horacio Lecona has been working for more than 20 years in culture and arts promotion, collaborating with...
MR 30th Anniversary Portfolio Part II
Which ideas have had/should have/will have the most influence on dance in the 21st century? Deborah Hay, Choreographer, Austin, TX I do not have an answer to your question, but...