Prompt: Movement Research was founded in 1978 as a self-described “laboratory” for investigating dance and movement. In its long history, the organization has prioritized giving space to artists for rehearsing, developing, and investigating—rather than presenting and producing—their work. The Movement Research Performance Journal can be seen as an outgrowth of this mission—extending the rehearsal studio into the space of the page. In its first issue, editor Richard Elovich describes the journal as “a new public space for the New York performance community…a slightly anarchic forum in which opposing ideas and aesthetics can be seriously developed and debated.” How do we understand this mission of staying in the zone of research today? How are artists (re)building pedagogy, and processes of learning, into their practice? What contemporary or historical alternative schools, and approaches to schooling, might be seen in constellation with the founding of Movement Research? How are students of dance and performance confronting the possibility and failure of an educational system predicated on both their enrichment and indebtedness?

Different archive editions of the journal available to consult in our space (not for sale). With editions ranging all through the history of the journal.

Available editions :

#03
#05
#14
#15
#19
#20
#22
#26
#50

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.

Movement Research announces Issue 54 of its publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. Continuing to experiment with approaches that engage contemporary choreography and performance through the medium of print—poem, prose, image, interview and a wide range of formats give form to critical and self-reflexive discourses and material histories. Movement Research Performance Journal acts as a site of convergence between publication, editors, writers, designers, and artists to consider the place of dance, performance, and choreography in relation to the contemporary moment.

For MRPJ54: Spatial Practice, guest editor, artist Alan Ruiz invited contributors to examine the ongoing legacy of neoliberalism and the cultural production it engenders, specifically focusing on the relation between bodies and the built environment. Contributors have explored the contexts and histories in which we dwell, create, and coexist to interrogate how space is produced both as material and ideology during the hyper-development and hyper-exploitation of the urban environment, predominantly in New York City. Spatial Practice asks: how does this impact the bodies that labor and move to keep the kinetic machine of “progress” moving? Contributions offer multiple perspectives—through a variety of genres—on the ways in which the political project of neoliberalism has, in part, shaped the designation and use of public space as well as enthroned the philanthropic class and the cultural institutions associated with them. Alongside the consolidation of wealth and power, neoliberalism’s underlying insistence on individualism has also reinforced and normalized the braided conditions of capitalist exploitation, structural racism, and patriarchal domination. Unraveling this logic allows us to collectively imagine alternatives to the prevailing systems of property, dispossession, ableism, and incarceration that parcelize existence.

Contributions from:

Critical Resistance, Alan Ruiz, Lluís Alexandre, Casanovas Blanco, Julie Tolentino and Sadia Shirazi, Kaegan Sparks, Martha Rosler, Suzanne Stephens, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Lo-Yi Chan and Tim Hartung, Olive McKeon, Alice Sheppard, Biba Bell, Erik Thurmond, BRANDT : HAFERD, V. Mitch McEwen and Olivier Tarpaga, Sarah Oppenheimer, Jimmy Robert and Mario Gooden, Dominic Cullinan, Angela Davis J. Bouey and Melanie Greene, Lisa Nelson, Diana Crum, Kristopher, K.Q. Pourzal, Jess Barbagallo, John Hoobyar and Simon Asencio, Layla Zami, Cristiane Bouger, Daria Faïn and Marjana Krajač, Germaine Acogny, Helmut Vogt and André Zachery, Milka Djordevich and Tim Reid, Melanie Maar.