Dancing Perfectly Free

Movement Research Spring Festival 2008, photo by Alex Escalante

The Movement Research Spring Festival 2009: ROLL CALL kicks off this Thursday with low-cost or free performances, classes, and discussions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Celebrating the 30^th anniversary of Movement Research, the festival will focus on local and international interactions around performance, dynamic use of public space, and collaborations among venues, choreographers, composers, curators, writers, visual, media and performing artists. This year’s curatorial committee, Megan Byrne, Michael Mahalchick, Regina Rocke, and Will Rawls, is certainly in touch with ways to reach audiences beyond the dance world. Rather than having the festival at one venue (last year’s was at Judson Memorial Church), it will be spread out over several locations. In a Time Out New York article, Rawls explains that “if we’re in an intense recession and people are going to be dropping off the radar, we needed to find a way to extend the latticeworks of infrastructure and creativity. It was important to initiate collaborations between venues and curators, and to highlight different parts of the city to keep things visible.”

Thursday’s opening night will take place at The New Museum and feature a documentary about the development of Movement Research from the 1970s to present day. Other exciting events include the collaborative 48x4x3 at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City; As The World Turns – with worldwide performances broadcast via Dance-Tech.tv and on view at the Harry De Jur Playhouse; and Archeography 4, a performance-architecture installation at SUPERFRONT gallery in Brooklyn. Check out the full lineup of events.

Movement Research Spring Festival 2009: ROLL CALL runs from April 23 through May 2.