Issue #44
Spring 2014
The various articles in this issue touch upon the material and immaterial conditions informing the production and reception of dance and performance. How are we citizens inside and outside of the theater? Why and how do we show ourselves and others on stage? Who has the agency to represent oneself and who possesses the agency to represent others? How does time change how we see what we see, onstage or otherwise?
A portfolio reflects on the influence of Jennifer Miller and her vast body of work. Contributions from Ira Livingston, Rachel Mattson and Jennifer Monson explore public and political dimensions of Jennifer's thorough and expansive work with Circus Amok, in the downtown dance scene, and in her solo shows. A reprint from the epilogue of Rachel Adams' Sideshow U.S.A. contextualizes Jennifer's work in the Sideshow and how that experience lives alongside her own Circus Amok.
Editorial team
Editor-In-Chief
Moriah Evans
Cover Artist
Jennifer Miller
Buck Wanner - David Knowles - effie bowen - Elena Light - Trajal Harrell
Managing Editor
Rebecca Wender
Copy Editor
Conor Creaney
Contributing Editor
emily Hoffman - Matthew Lyons - Daria Faïn - Biba Bell - Elizabeth Feidelson
Ad Layout
Catherine Galasso
Articles
Editors' Letter
Dear Readers, I've been thinking about the role of iconoclasm in dance and its inevitable relationship to reverence. Perhaps an iconoclast is inherently hypocritical for to celebrate something is also...
Spaces & Places: Studios Worked Here
This piece was sparked by a project that Anja Hitzenberger and I started in 2008, to document Manhattan modern dance studios active be tween 1980-2000. On one level it was...
Datebook: Annie Dorsen
1973 I am born! 1979-1993 I went to Brearley, a fancy blue-blood Upper East Side school in New York where I started doing plays because I was a good reader-out-loud....
Past, Present and Future: The Oral History Project and Archive at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division
YESTERDAY Time is a funny thing. It is hard for me to believe that I have been the Coordinator of the Dance Oral History Project and Archive at the New...
Mapping a Non-linear Lineage
I want to know you. You, who were here before me. You, who are still here, carrying on. You, who are now gone. Gone because of rising rents. Gone because...
Oral History and Dance: A Primer
I. Writing about oral history is a little like writing about dance: important and impossible. Nothing I write in this essay can approximate orality: the awkward silences, heavy breathing, or...
Peggy Jarrell Kaplan’s Portraits
"Somehow the studio became a little performance place," explains photographer Peggy Jarrell Kaplan, as choreographers' faces captured on film stare at her from the walls of her apartment. She's discussing...
The Witty That Neva Sleeps
On Trial Together: Collective Action: Sasa Asentic & Ana Vulanovic’s “On Trial Together”
Where are our forums? If Hannah Arendt was right that a robust public sphere requires a spatial element, where does contemporary democracy take place? The voting booth is a poor...
Body: Dildo, Anus, etc.
Daria Faïn: It seems to me that through the experience of the dildo in the rectum - as it is not only the anus we are referencing - you found...
Focus on the Work: Maria Hassabi
Moriah: So you just got back from Athens. You're from Athens, Right? Maria: I'm from Cyprus. My family lives in Athens, so that's where I go a lot. I moved...
From Here: Notes on Dancing in Detroit
"... unless she could step away from the assembly line of her own temporal ity and simply stop." – Eve Sedgwick After a decade in New York City I moved...
Marissa Perel at Vox Populi
In November and December 2013, Marissa Perel curated two performance and discussion programs as part of her residency at Philadelphia artist collective Vox Populi's new AUX Performance Space. This venture...
Witnessing/Vanishing: Miguel Gutierrez’s myendlesslove
After seeing Miguel Gutierrez's myendlesslove, a friend asked me if, as a gay man, I felt any particular insight into what we had just seen. This 2006 piece, which Gutierrez...
Centerfold: Antonio Ramos
Jennifer Miller in conversation with Ezra Berkley Nepon
Ezra Berkley Nepon: So, lets start out with the basic stuff. Where did you come from? How did you get into performance? Jennifer Miller: I was born in Los Angeles,...
Circus Amok: “The Most Untiring and Gayest”
I. I found Circus Amok by accident, during one of the seemingly endless dark years of the George W. Bush presidency. It was a late summer afternoon in 2007. I...
Jennifer Miller’s Zenobia
Over the past decade or so, there has been an explosion of critical writing about the history and politics of the circus sideshow. Scholars passionately debate a wide range of...
From Flourish to Filp: Dancing with Miller in Amok and Beyond
I first met Jennifer Miller at Performance Space 122 when she was dancing with the improvisation group Screws Loose in the late 80s. Since then I have worked with her...
Going for the Juggler
Bob writes for the Times. Jenny's a music archivist. Adrian teaches gymnastics. But like Burt Lancaster, Federico Fellini, and George Plimpton before them, they've all run away to join the...
Sideshow USA: Bearded Lady & Revolutionary
A fixture of the Williamsburg circus subculture, the radical activist and performance artist Jennifer Miller might just be Leslie Fiedler's worst nightmare. In chapter 6, I quoted Fiedler's unfavorable characterization...
Oeuvre
In-depth: It’s a Lot of Work to Dance or Sometimes to Not Dance: Jerome Bel and Theater Hora’s “Disabled Theater”
Following Saturday's performance of Disabled Theater at New York Live Arts, November 16th 2013, a talkback entitled "Theater, Discomfort, and the Making of Disabled Theater" took place onstage. Prior to...
Exit Interview
MRPJ 2/5/14 7:26 PM so, we wanted to do an interview feature with you because you have been an instrumental part of the performance journal for years... how long have...