On Sunday, 17 November (7 pm) the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (ul. Emilii Plater 51) will showcase the second piece of a series of three innovative performances by New Your artists to be presented at the museum, which draw on its currently exhibited collection, titled In the Heart of the Country [W sercu kraju], expanding its reach, setting out new horizons, connections, questions and interpretations.
Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)is the last dance work in an expansive six works series “Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church”, conceived by Trajal Harrell, an American choreographer and dancer. The project is Harrell’s in-depth critical reexamination of the seminal minimalist attitudes and aesthetics of postmodern American dance and those of Harlem pop tradition of voguing and its drag ballroom scene and culture. “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the Voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early post-moderns at Judson Church?” is achallenging proposition repositioning social and aesthetic politic of dance and movement.
Voguing has been an important, deeply running current in the history of pop culture, that of performance of self-creation and identity as vehicles for individual and social empowerment. Were we to look in the museum for contexts for the dance of flamboyancy, exuberance, opulence, affect, and emotions, such an unstable barometer would lead us to the works of Miron Bialoszewski, Krzysztof Niemczyk, and Jack Smith.
Trajal Harrell is achoreographer and dancer who is based in New York and Athens. He recently performed Shirtology of Jérôme Bel for “20 Dancers for the XX Century,” aproject conceived by Boris Charmatz and presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (October 2013). Harrell is currently researching butoh and Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata for an upcoming dance commission at the MoMA in New York. His works have been presented widely at multiple international dance festivals and venues: Impulstanz Festival, Vienna; Paris Festival d’Automne; Danspace Project, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Cialo/Umysl (body/Mind), Warsaw; and in museums such as MoMA New York, Walker Art Center, PS1 MoMA, ICA Boston, New Museum.
Next performance of the series will be presented in March 2014 by New York-based, Japanese artist Ei Arakawa.
Choreography:Trajal Harrell
Dancers:Rob Fordeyn, Trajal Harrell, Thibault Lac
Costume design:complexgeometries
Sound design:Trajal Harrell
First presented 11-13 October, 2012 at Danspace Project, New York.
Co-production:Danz im August, Danspace Project for Platform 2012: Judson@50, MoMA PS1, and Hau Hebbel am Ufer.
Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M) was made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation and by Danspace Project’s 2012-2013 Commissioning Initiative, which receives major support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
International Distribution & Production:Key Performance