Movement Research Performance Journal

Issue 57 of the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) takes up the keyword “work.” Given that Movement Research has a history of being an organization of artists laboring for and with one another, we invited contributors to consider, revise, or push against questions like: how are things working today? What is the condition of labor in the field of dance and performance? What does it mean to be or have a body that works, on which work is (or isn’t) projected? How do idealizations of the laboring body and/or the ethos of collective practice relate to or obscure the lived experience of making dance works, working in dance, or balancing artistic production with the productive demands of one’s so-called “survival job”? To work in dance (or the arts in general) is indisputably to be exploited. But the contributors to this issue both directly and obliquely take up the experience of working as both enervating and energizing (in often contradictory ways), and draw from their different experiences of working work’s uneven distribution across the globe, the abelism that belies work’s regimentation, and the on-going struggle to find solidarity among arts workers.

More than thematically linked, the issue’s three sections also reflect a desire to address how this publication itself asks artists to work. Artist-run since 1990, the burden of administering a publication like the MRPJ was (perhaps) once outweighed by the promise of what this kind of project could do to shape the field of dance and performance. Today, that editorial and administrative labor dovetails all too well with what has become naturalized as an expectation of practicing artists—that they write about what they are doing or want to do in grant applications, that they create content to be used both for educating and marketing to audiences, and that they develop a discourse that signifies the value of their work in relation to any number of fields other than dance.

For Issue 57, the MRPJ editorial team (Josh Lubin-Levy, John Arthur Peetz, and Nicole Bradbury) gave the keyword “work” to three artists designated as “Contributing Editors” (nora chipaumire, Jerron Herman, and Alex Rodabaugh). nora, Jerron, and Alex were each invited to invite three to five other participants to join the discussion but also encouraged to pass on the administrative and editorial labor to the MPRJ staff.

Issue 57 is only the beginning of thinking about how the structure of a journal on and by artists needs to adapt to an era in which content creation exists in overdrive.

Theories of dance dramaturgy can be found in a growing body of literature on the field (see our incomplete reading list in this issue). But for Issue #61 of the Movement Research Performance Journal the editors decided stay in the not-knowing by inviting contributions from those whose work touches on dance dramaturgy with curiosity, anxiety, anarchy, as well as a conviction for the intimacy it requires and a resistance to its history of institutional/state authority.

At the heart of the issue is a special section by Contributing Editor Ligia Lewis. Across Lewis’ works there are not only a range of dramaturgs, but the role of dramaturgy shifts and morphs in relationship to the differing works and over time.  The reinvention of the dramaturg that Lewis’ work articulates is something that has proliferate throughout the field of contemporary dance. The rest of the issue includes a range of texts, some from practicing dramaturgs, others from to those who have reluctantly accepted this title, and still more who reject the role outright — all exploring a simple question: why has there been an explosion of interest in, perhaps even desire for, dramaturgs in contemporary dance? The explosion I’m thinking of is not about a growing professionalization of dance dramaturgy (though that is certainly happening…). I mean simply that more dance and performance artists are including dramaturgs as part of their process, and at the same time seem to be continually reinventing what the dramaturg is meant to do. What can we make of the desire for the dramaturg as well as the desire to continually reinvent this figure and its function?

What began as a project responding to the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘end’ of the Vietnam War became a project of inhabiting the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) from within the landscape of contemporary Vietnamese performance art. The result, Issue #62, is a window onto a community of insiders who reflect a set of concerns, questions, historical trajectories, and aesthetic legacies that differ from what has more often been foregrounded in our U.S./New York City-centric publication. Like other documents of this kind, which endeavor to portray a performance scene that will be foreign to many readers, the texts from this group of intergenerational, contemporary artists demonstrate a careful navigation of the dialectics of inside and outside, self and other, performer and audience, seeing and being seen, that informs every exchange across cultural difference.

The texts are also not monolithic, suggesting a range of relations to the Vietnam of the past and present, from within Vietnam’s national borders and among the diaspora. Especially for contributors living and working in Vietnam, writing has also been a practice of choreographing words within a political landscape where to speak publicly, in itself, is a performance of negotiated risk. Embracing the complexities of these differing positions has been the focus of our editorial process—one that has asked the editorial team to embrace the limits of our own knowledge, to recognize we will not be able to recognize all valences others may discover in these texts, and not to edit these layers out of the works that follows.

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 Performance Journal #58/59, explores notions of performance as “research”—a word intrinsic to our parent organization and its long history of supporting process over product. Contributing editors Sorour Darabi, Lauren Bakst, and Niall Jones, delve into themes of research, care, pedagogy, and protest in dance and performance across artistic and educational institutions.

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.