Issue #55
Summer 2021
Movement Research announces Issue 55 of its publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. The first issue produced by new co-Editors-in-Chief mayfield brooks and Joshua Lubin-Levy, this issue continues the MRPJ’s legacy of experimenting with approaches that engage contemporary choreography and performance through the medium of print, including poem, prose, image, interview and a wide range of other formats.
But how do you make a journal dedicated to, but in the absence of, live performance? In asking this question, we’re not concerned to preserve a fetishistic idea of liveness and in-person gatherings—rather, we’re haunted by a strong ambivalence towards the many ways arts institutions swiftly adapted to the new online environment, adhering to that old adage “the show must go on.’’ In the wake of global Black Lives Matter uprisings in response to George Floyd’s murder and the gross disparities exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic the show cannot go on. In producing this journal, the editorial team spent many meetings wondering how we had ever performed under those conditions and institutions in the first place? How do we resist the push to reopen? How is it possible to acknowledge parts of our lives that are in disrepair? Can the forced delay also function as a strategy of resistance? Is it possible to refuse explanatory narratives, narrative structures, chronologies, and to embrace decomposition, decay, and the repair made possible in coming undone? “no before no after” was conceived with these, and many other, questions in mind.
Issue #55 is the first in a two-part project titled “no before no after” conceived by the journal’s new co-Editors-in-Chief mayfield brooks and Joshua Lubin-Levy.
Editorial team
Editor-In-Chief
mayfield brooks - Joshua Lubin-Levy
Managing Editor
John Arthur Peetz
Articles
A CONVERSATION WITH THE MALE GAYZE
That feeling you get when you’ve written something, particularly when it’s something you’ve written a long time ago that you can’t bear to look at now because it contains so...
DBIPOCUNFRAGMENTED
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Kayla sits at her spherical-shaped brown table in her basement apartment in the North Bronx sipping her heavy creamed coffee from a large-mouth, almond-colored coffee mug...
"Undo Respectability, Aids Mutually" Simon Wu in conversation with Morgan Bobrow-Williams, DonChristian Jones, Mercy Kelly, Akua Murray-Adoboe, Jake Robbins, Amani Sampson, Bryan Villalobos, and Caroline Wineburg
On the corner of Franklin Ave and Park Place in the heart of Crown Heights, across the street from the bodega where my roommate buys her cigarettes, members of Public...
Explain Totality
I first encountered punk music inside my family’s suburban home at the bottom of a winding hill and the edge of the woods. Descending the hill, lined with other houses...
PALIMPSEST OF THE PEOPLE: ON GRAND RE UNION
PROBLEM POEM Change is in the air. Post-Systems. Post-Disciplines. Post-Hierarchies. Is change in the air? Undoing, unstitching, unmaking. in between and around over and under spreading, blurring, opening the binaries...
What are my Atoms Doing?
Edited and with an introduction by Tony Perucci Excerpted from On the Horizontal: Mary Overlie and the Viewpoints by Tony Perucci, forthcoming from University of Michigan Press When Movement Research...
COMMENSURATE WITH EXPERIENCE
It’s no coincidence that every administrative arts worker I know is burnt out. We’re constantly swapping job postings seeking greener pastures, but we also commiserate knowing every institution is a...
A Time of Plants, A Time of Ghosts
We live in extractivist times. The colonial-capitalist way of living is based on taking and consuming without providing for regeneration. The economist Alberto Acosta gives us the most comprehensible definition...
Some of Us are Weeds
“NO HUMANS INVOLVED”: AN OPEN LETTER TO MY COLLEAGUES (EXCERPT)
Sylvia Wynter wrote “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to my Colleagues” in 1992 based on the discovery, during the trial of four police officers for the beating of Rodney...
Letters to Ourselves
I want to start by saying I love you. In my flesh I type this text in hopes that you imagine a world outside of the violence of the Americas...
Letters to Ourselves
A Practice of Gathering
Performance emerges through and as an act of gathering. There is, furthermore, an intertwined relationship between performance, philosophy and political education, such that pedagogy can be understood as a way...
Viral Angst: On Performance and Social Media
Every body performs online—some bodies more than others. Perhaps because of the total ubiquity of performance in the social media sphere, the institutions of performance and dance have struggled to...
Go Forth
There was a moment in the 1960s when the public housing erected along the East coast from New York to North Carolina included purpose-built theaters, places for performance. Since then,...
The Wound for a Generous Revolution
“Performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated. It can be performed again, but this repetition itself marks it as ‘different.’ The document of a performance then is...
Architecture of Memory
A dreamer I am an architect of memory I live in the clouds My body recomposing Shifting the almost-disappearing landscape between perception and sensation my body-worlding displacing linear time Architecture...
Nigredo (The Blackening): mayfield brooks and brontë velez in conversation
mayfield brooks: I am so excited to hav this conversation with you, brontë. brontë velez: I am so excited too! brooks: I’ve been looking forward to this for a while,...