Sustainable Dance Floor XL
July 11, 2010
At the 2010 Winter Olympics, over 8,000,000 watts of energy were generated less than a week into the games thanks to Sustainable Dance Floor, a special floor that produces energy as people dance on it. Sustainable Dance Floor is a product of Sustainable Dance Club (SDC), a Rotterdam-based company that enables clubs, festivals, and events to become more sustainable by combining creative approaches with innovative technologies. SDC recently released Sustainable Dance Floor XL, a short video that visualizes how dancers’ movements can create energy on a stadium-sized floor (which lights up just like the floor in Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video). If this floor is realized, it would be the largest LED screen in the world, fully powered by human energy. Pretty cool, no? Watch the video below.
DOUBLE VISION Presents Hysteresis
July 7, 2010
Blaine Bookey, Wendy Marinaccio, Jennifer Mellor, Emily Gorman, and Cecelia Peterson in Hysteresis, photo by Rick Mellor
San Francisco-based dance company DOUBLE VISION will present the east coast premiere of Hysteresis at the Merce Cunningham Studio in New York City on Friday, July 9th and Saturday, July 10th. Under the direction of choreographer Pauline Jennings and composer Sean Clute, DOUBLE VISION has created un-conventional inter-media performances fusing dance, music, and video that embody the changing landscape of contemporary culture. Free from traditional structures and narratives, Hysteresis evokes an abstract dreamscape rich in complex shapes, relationships, and points of meditation. To deliver a rich, visceral experience, unique to each audience member, the work presents them with unknown customs, languages, and symbols through movement, sound, and the implementation of hysteretic systems. Fleeting patterns dissolve into autonomous poly-rhythms and intersecting lines as five dancers slip through light – leaping, twisting, striking, and resisting rest.
Hysteresis features choreography by Pauline Jennings, music by Sean Clute, lighting design by Ben Coolik, costuming by Andrea Campbell and performances by Blaine Bookey, Emily Gorman, Wendy Marinaccio, Jennifer Mellor and Cecelia Peterson.
DOUBLE VISION will perform on Friday, July 9th at 9 PM and Saturday, July 10th at 8 PM at the Merce Cunningham Studio: 55 Bethune Street, NYC. Tickets can be purchased online or by calling 347.329.1296.
Off the Wall at the Whitney
July 2, 2010
Trisha Brown Dance Company at the Whitney Museum, 1971, photo by Walter Gutman, courtesy Anthology Film Archives
From July 1st through September 19th, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents Off the Wall, a two-part exhibition that brings together thirty performative actions by artists, in works made from 1946 to the present, and seven iconic works by Trisha Brown. One of these works, Skymap (1969), was performed at the Dia:Beacon this past winter.
Part I: Thirty Performative Actions
On view from July 1 – September 19, Off the Wall: Thirty Performative Actions, focuses on actions using the body in live performance, in front of the camera, or in relation to a photograph or a drawing. Each action displaces the site of the artwork from an object to the body, acting in relation to, or directly onto, the physical space of the gallery. The wall and floor are often the stage for these actions: walking on the wall, slamming a door, gathering sawdust up from the studio floor, slapping hands against the wall, walking on a painting, striding and crawling, writing or drawing on the wall and the floor, or performing a striptease. The actions include re-performances of iconic early works by John Baldessari (I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, (1971) and Yoko Ono (Painting to be Stepped On, (1961), realized by Nate Lowman), as well as recent works by young artists including Dara Friedman and Trisha Donnelly, and David Hammons’ video installation Phat Feet, in which the sidewalk of the Bowery in downtown New York City becomes the stage.
Also included are works by Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Jonathan Borofsky, John Coplans, David Hammons, Joan Jonas, Paul McCarthy, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, David Salle, Lucas Samaras, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. The use of the performative action by women to challenge male definitions of the body can be seen in works by Jenny Holzer, Dara Birnbaum, Martha Rosler, Hannah Wilke, Francesca Woodman, Carrie Mae Weems and Carolee Schneemann. The unprecedented crossover between dance and performance that occurred in the 1970s can also be seen in works by Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Maya Deren, Simone Forti, and Nauman.
The exhibition includes a number of works that reveal the underlying theatricality of the performative action, and the ways in which artists stage the self in images that question conventions of identity, gender, and perceptions of the body. In the work of artists including Laurie Simmons, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Tony Oursler and Sonic Youth, Francesca Woodman, Jimmy DeSana, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Jack Pierson, Lyle Ashton Harris and Robert Mapplethorpe, the camera replaces the white cube of the gallery as the stage upon which action occurs.
Part 1 is curated by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator.
Part 2: Seven Works by Trisha Brown
Part 2 features the Trisha Brown Dance Company, on the occasion of the company’s fortieth anniversary. Six dance works and a sound installation made in the late 1960s and early 1970s will be presented. The dance works will be performed daily from September 30 through October 3, 2010, in the Second Floor Galleries, the Sculpture Court, and outside the Whitney Museum of American Art on East 75th Street. Trisha Brown’s history with the Whitney began when the now-acclaimed choreographer first brought her work uptown, to the Whitney’s Breuer building, after having debuted much of her work in downtown Manhattan, in Soho and at the Judson Church, among other places. Some of Brown’s most important early works including Walking on the Wall (1970), Leaning Duets II (1971), Falling Duet I (1968), Falling Duet II (1971), and Skymap (1969), were performed at the Whitney on March 30 and 31, 1971, as part of an evening titled “Another Fearless Dance Concert.” They are all re-presented in this exhibition. When asked recently about her relationship to the Whitney, Brown commented, “The Whitney? I was born there!”
Part 2 is curated by Limor Tomer, the Whitney’s Adjunct Curator of Performing Arts.
