Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo Bene and the Undead

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

Bodies and Technologies is a collection of texts that inspire modes of attunement to how technologies condition and rewire the experience of our bodies. To ask how different embodied ways of being in the world can disrupt the behaviour and performance of technologies, this reader compiles material from the If I Can’t Dance reading group in Amsterdam as part of Edition XI–Bodies and Technologies (2022–24). 

The reader includes texts by M. Jacqui Alexander, Alok, Gloria Anzaldúa, Tina M.Campt, Kai Cheng Thom, Arturo Escobar, BrandonLaBelle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Resmaa Menakem, Adrienne maree brown, Kate Morales, Rolando Vázquez Melken and Gloria Wekker, and with a sonic contribution by artist Ciro Monoarfa Goudsmit. 

In Perpetuity is part of Ivey Wawn’s project of the same name. With contributions from those involved in the making of what would have been the live performance, it is an accumulation of thoughts, reflections and associated pieces of work that give some idea of what the work could, would, or may in the future come to be. 

In Perpetuity is an ongoing project that has taken a variety of forms, from publication, through video and into live performance.

Five dance pieces and an iconographic imaginary in convulsion: making the most of these ingredients, Alexandra Balona engages with the work of Cabo Verdean choreographer and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas.

This book offers a lens onto the dazzling oeuvre of a choreographer whose boldness shakes the foundations of every theater she enters. It centers on five emblematic works: Guintche (2010), Paradise—Private Collection (2012), Jaguar (2015), Bacchae—Prelude to a Purge (2017), and Mal—Embriaguez Divina (2020). It follows Monteiro Freitas's creative methodology, weaving references from her personal archive together with works from art history, navigating between ideas and possibilities in the manner of an atlas bearing the weight of the world. From wonder emerges a mode of attentive reading; one capable of observing and, out of fragments, revealing the methods, processes, and mechanisms of art. The texts in this book are "small critical machines for reading the unreadable."

Troubling the Stage: The Choreographic Work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas is both a study and an encounter; a powerful crossing of choreography with critical thought. It invites readers, scholars, and audiences alike to experience the intensity, violence, joy, and humanity of one of today's most uncompromising choreographic voices.

A special issue focused on performance writing, with work by Tanya Lukin Linklater (with Michael Nardone), Jibade-Khalil Huffman & Simone White, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Claudina Domingo (trans. Ryan Greene), Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Walker, Liz Knox, Rona Lorimer, Léo Richard, & Hector Uniacke, Mohamed A. Gawad & Dalia Neis, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Teddy Yoshikami, interviewed by Michelle N. Huang, Kyoo Lee and Jocelyn Saidenberg, Adriana Garriga-López, Gabrielle Civil, plus a Kevin Killian Tribute, with Eileen Myles * Scott Hewicker * Cliff Hengst * Karla Milosevich * Craig Goodman * Michelle Rollman * Anne McGuire * Wayne Smith * Tanya Hollis * Steve Orth * Lindsey Boldt * Maxe Crandall * Arnold J. Kemp * Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn * Susan Gevirtz * Laynie Browne * Patrick Durgin * Norma Cole * Jo Giardini. & reviews: Jessica Lopez Lyman & Jocelyn E. Marshall on Gabrielle Civil, alex cruse on Merce Cunningham, Rob Stanton on Anne Boyer, Jack Chelgren on Miyó Vestrini, David Grundy on Stephen Jonas, Virginia Konchan on Sarah Vap.

As a stretch of land cultivated for crops to grow, a field evokes sensuous associations of smells, turned soil, exposure to weather. In a sense, fields ground our entire sedentary civilization and the cultures it gave rise to. At the same time, the field is where bodies fall in battle, the site that hosts the perishing of things.

Interweaving strands of autobiography with mythological and cultural tropes, Julien Bruneau explores the field as a metaphor rich with meaning and possibility. How do we inhabit fields and their furrows? How in turn do their history and imagination traverse us? As if it were a dance on the page, Fields invites the reader to encounter, think and feel our entanglement with space and places.

Julien Bruneau is an artist working with dance, presence, drawing and writing. His interest lies in the dynamic interplay between interiority and the collective.

Soloing on the page, choreographer Annie-B Parson rethinks choreography as dance on paper. Parson draws her dances into new graphic structures calling attention to the visual facts of the materiality of each dance work she has made. These drawings serve as both maps of her pieces in the aftermath of performance, and a consideration of the elements of dance itself. 

Divided into three chapters, the book opens with diagrams of the objects in each of her pieces grouped into chart-structures. These charts reconsider her dances both from the perspective of the resonance of things, and for their abstract compositional properties. In chapter two, Parson delves into the choreographic mind, charting such ideas as an equality in the perception of objects and movement, and the poetics of a kinetic grammar. Charts of erasure, layering and language serve as dynamic and prismatic tools for dance making. Lastly, nodding to the history of chance operations in dance, Parson creates a generative card game of 52 compositional elements for artists of any medium to cut out and play as a method for creating new material. Within the duality of form and content, this book explores the meanings that form itself holds, and Parson's visual maps of choreographic ideas inspire new thinking around the shared elements underneath all art making.

ANNIE-B PARSON is a choreographer and artistic director of Big Dance Theater. Parson has also made choreography for rock shows, marching bands, symphonies, movies, museums, objects, augmented reality, and people: David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Laurie Anderson, Nico Muhly, Jonathan Demme, and the Martha Graham Dance Co. SIOBHAN BURKE writes on dance for the New York Times and other publications. She teaches at Barnard College.