Issue #56
Summer 2022
Movement Research announces Issue 56 of its publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. This issue continues the journal’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. It is also the second installment of the project “no before no after,” conceived by Joshua Lubin-Levy and mayfield brooks.
Our preceding issue asked over twenty contributors to respond to the question: how do you make a journal dedicated to, but in the absence of, live performance? Their responses were shaped by the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, but also by the global Black Lives Matter movement under which conversations about “liveness” took on new urgencies. In the ensuing years, as performances venues have both shuttered and pressured artist to return to “normal,” the brutal calculus of the art economy demanding that the show go on has been exposed. At the same time, many within those venues have worked to catalyze utopian practice that reshape the field of performance through the ways we work together and what we are working towards. Issue 56 takes up both trajectories—questioning the pull of normalcy and shedding light on the practices helping others reimagine navigate this postlapsarian condition.
Editorial team
Editor-In-Chief
Joshua Lubin-Levy
Contributing Editor
mayfield brooks
Managing Editor
John Arthur Peetz
Assistant Editor
Nicole Bradbury
Copy Editor
Becca Teich
Design
Sean Yendrys - Yotam Hadar
Articles
Untitled by Anton Ovichinnikov
When this is all over, will you still be dancing? What will the dance be like? Have you already begun to envision it? Are you stretching your joints, warming up...
Realness Beyond the Flat
Zachary Fabri is an American-bom NewYork-based multidisciplinary artist working at the intersections of movement, performance, video, and photography. His work explores Black masculinity throughZachary Fabri is an American-born New York-based...
How to Choreograph (BLK) Madness with Lisa Nelson's Tuning Scores in Mind
Subjective vertigo is vertigo of the event. But the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that one's environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a...
As We See It: Black Elders on Writing on Dance: Eva Yaa Asantewaa in conversation with Brenda Dixon-Gottschild and Charmaine Warren
After several decades of writing professionally about the art of dance-from my early days free lancing for Dance Magazine and The Village Voice to my most recent work on my...
Phoenix – The New Wisdom
... artists at their best navigate multiplicity. We're trick sters. We're able to exist at the crossroads. Africans have evolved the aesthetic of nomads. To be able to create an...
Notes on Devotion
In an interview filmed in 2011, Philip Bither asks choreographer Sarah Michelson why she chose the title Devotion for her latest work. "Devotion" in relation to a higher spiritual being?...
Untitled
My mother, who turned seventy on Christmas Day of the first year of the pandemic, recently said to me that she had one regret in life: that she had never...
Walking, Dancing, and the Brace
I was not braced for the joy, but I ended up saturated by it. Here are some things I remember from that night. Inside a black-walled space, long sheets of...
One and Only
Sophia Cleary tells a joke about herself by way of introduction and the punchline is "the doula to Botox pipeline." Or perhaps it's the other way around, but it can...
Sketches for Thinking Dance After the Plague
I have written this essay four times over. I hadn't planned for it to be like that. I had wanted it to come easy, instinctively, like the silly dances I...
A Field Guide to Lacto-Fermentation in Four Lessons
I'm going to let my dance making ferment. Let it sit in the back of my mind along with the recessed memories, intuitive knowledge, hidden fears, and surfacing desires. I'm...
A N T E F R E E Z E
Editor's Letter
This issue is late and I have avoided writing this editor's letter. Many factors have contributed to these delays. First is the fact that Issue 56 brings to a close...
I'm Swimming with Kathleen
Kathleen Hermesdorf's eyes were vivid, an extreme blue. They melted me the first time I met her. They were liquid and sometimes overly soft, seductive, and heavy, but vulnerable and...
One Poem & One Note
be a bridge over (something).(1) be echo or residue or green question Be a loose suture, extension, and supplement be a primrose and covenant Be an image pinched and pruned...