Issue #58/59

Under the direction of four contributing editors—Amalle Dublon, Kay Gabriel, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, and Anh Vo— we’ve assembled a new body of work by mostly trans and queer artists reflecting on the keyword “gender” and its relation to contemporary performance. Their work moves across multiple genres of writing, from analytic essays to poetry to performance scripts. 

“Read My Lips” is a phrase that will be familiar to longtime readers of the Movement Research Performance Journal—so familiar that the mere reference will bring to mind an image posted by the artist collective GANG, an image that lies at the heart of one of the journal’s most spectacular moments. Issue #3, with its focus “Gender Performance,” was published in 1991 amid that era’s Culture Wars, receiving almost immediately negative reception from government officials (the NEA threatened to withdraw funding from Movement Research) and many members of the dance community (who considered Issue #3 to be deliberately provoking the so-called “war,” intentionally taking a political position that some worried might comprise future funding of the field). In the thirty-three years since its publication, Issue #3 has developed a patina familiar to many artist-activist histories that are looked upon with romance and nostalgia, often by those for whom that history is only a fantasy (rather than a lived experience). 

Movement Research announces Issue 52/53 of its print publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. For this issue, Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, guest editor, choreographer Rosy Simas invited writer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, to work with her. Together they assembled contributors from Native and Indigenous communities to reflect upon their practices, the historical conditions out of which they operate as well as movement, performance, and choreography as a socio-political project. Just as it is important for physical institutions to acknowledge that they sit upon occupied land of Native and Indigenous people, so too must institutions of history, practice, and epistemology acknowledge their occupation of knowledge and memory.

Throughout this issue, dance and movement is posited as a powerful strategy against settler-colonial mindsets and as an effective tool against erasure of Native and Indigenous cultural traditions. These pages discuss the importance of Native sovereignty and analyze various histories of resistance to settler-colonialism. Artists in the issue propose alternative artistic models to probe the roles of art and artists in society towards a more expansive constellation that fundamentally critiques the Western reward system in culture as well as the often celebrated cult of authorship.

Accompanying a series of solo collaborations in 2020, this publication offers the first comprehensive and global perspective on Jeremiah Day's work as an artist, performer, researcher and teacher. As it details Day's specific works and evolution between visual and performing arts and between political reflection and engagement the result also serves as sourcebook for the legacy of the intersection between dance and the visual arts of the 1960s and 70's and the models of cultural practice emerging from the work of Hannah Arendt.

In his work, the Berlin-based American artist Jeremiah Day (born 1974 in Plymouth) re-examines recent political struggles and conflicts, revealing their subjective contexts and traces. To do this, he has developed a narrative and choreographic form in which personal and political realities intermingle, thus offering a thoroughly singular vision of these at times forgotten moments of history. 

The distinctive feature of his method lies in a transversal approach. As a student of and regular collaborator with Simone Forti, one of the pioneers of Post-Modern Dance, he has turned performance into a now central and structure-providing practice. Since 2014, Jeremiah Day has in effect presented many performances, which contain movement, improvisation, photography and the spoken word, in order to broach universal historical and political subjects, but within an intimate and incarnated context.

The Forgive Us Our Trespasses Reader explores radical and emancipatory significations and fabulations of trespassing, turning towards practices that transgress and reshape the boundaries of, among other dimensions, currency, governance, religion, spirituality, language, and artificial intelligence.

Complementing the thematic concerns of the exhibition of the same name, this collection of essays, poems, artistic contributions, and a sermon, conceptually maps the distance between the English word "trespasses"—with its double meaning of to sin or to physically tread—and the German word "Schuld"—referring to sin and guilt but with etymological proximities to debt (Schulden). Deviating from the line of prayer that lends the project its name, the contributors do not ask for forgiveness for the various trespasses they elucidate—be they religious, social, class-related, national, sexual, or disciplinary in nature—but rather assert them as modes of transgression, as forms of rebellion, and as possibilities for transcendence.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2024.

Contributions by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Egidija Čiricaitė, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Toussaint M. Kafarhire, Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, Chao Tayiana Maina, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Tavia Nyong’o, Mary Louise Pratt, Josefine Rauch, Deborah A. Thomas, Senthuran Varatharajah, Yuanwen Zhong.

Hardscapes / Here documents and brings together two exhibition projects by artists Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions of the same name curated by Samuele Piazza at the OGR Torino, the publication consists of two graphically specular books that merge into a single volume. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.

Hassabi's live installation Here calls on visitors to share space and spend time with six performers portrayed in a decelerated rhythmic choreography within a sculptural environment. In constant motion, the dancers contribute to a situation of shifting presence, demonstrating the contestable nature of the "here and now." Immobility and slowing down are thus used both as techniques and as subjects of representation: the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, living body and static image.

Canell's Hardscapes combines two works that focus on the concepts of circulation and transformation as well as on unexpected forms of coexistence. Energy Budget (2017–18), a video that alternates between two subjects: a basement in which a leopard snail crawls over an electrical panel, and the gradual shifting of the frame away from "dragon gates"—portal-like openings in huge buildings on the Hong Kong waterfront. Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) (2020–21) is a floor sculpture, decomposed and transformed by the density of moving bodies, which literally crumbles under the soles of passing visitors.

In addition to texts by the curator, the publication includes essays by Felicia Leu and Laura Preston, along with a conversation by Maria Hassabi and Nina Canell with Lorenzo Giusti.

Published on the occasion of the epoymous exhibitions at OGR Torino in 2022.

Edited by Samuele Piazza.
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti, Felicia F. Leu, Samuele Piazza, Laura Preston.

JJ brings together articles by cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon Jill Johnston, translated into French for the first time, as well as texts, poems and drawings by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel and Rosanna Puyol.

Jill Johnston (1929-2010) was a dance critic, performer, writer, and feminist and lesbian activist. Her books include Marmalade Me (1971), Lesbian Nation (1973), Gullibles Travels (1974) and numerous articles in The Village Voice.

Texts by Jill Johnston; contributions by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Translated from the English (American) by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).