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# Dances of Doom and Transcendence
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/dances-of-doom-and-transcendence/
- Published: 2017-11-14T20:16:32.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:11:33.000Z
- Description: Choreographer Gillian Walsh takes on dance as a "suicidal tendency" and considers mysticism in a time of global crisis.
- Author: Laila Pedro
- Tags: Art, Dance, Events, Performa, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:30(2016, 2017, part 3)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2017/11/gwalshmoonfatesinshowimage-internet-screen-shot-courtesy-of-gillian-walsh--copy.jpg)

(screenshot courtesy Gillian Walsh)

Dance movements are notoriously difficult to depict and record. Louis XIV, the great innovator and supporter of the *ballets de cour* that would become what we now recognize generally as “ballet,” commissioned the choreographer and composer Pierre Beauchamp to create a notation system; its [elaborate diagrams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauchamp-Feuillet%5Fnotation?ref=hyperallergic.com) mark turns, steps, floor patterns, entrances, and exits. In the 20th century, the wonderfully modernist marks of [Labanotation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labanotation?ref=hyperallergic.com#/media/File:Labanotation3.JPG) approximated the ordered movements of dances through a set of binary oppositions in specific qualitative dimensions: Space (Direct/Indirect); Weight (Strong/Light); Time (Sudden/ Sustained); and Flow (Bound/Free).

Gillian Walsh has been [interested](https://www.timeout.com/newyork/dance/choreographer-gillian-walsh-talks-about-her-first-evening-length-work?ref=hyperallergic.com) in these themes of structural lineages and oppositions: the inside and outside of a dancer in a dance, what’s visible and what’s hidden, what we are supposed to see and not, how and why we attribute merit and value. This weekend, Danspace Project presents Walsh’s “[Moon Fate Sin](http://17.performa-arts.org/events/gillian-walsh?ref=hyperallergic.com),” as part of [Performa 17](http://17.performa-arts.org/?ref=hyperallergic.com). Walsh plumbs deeply the hope and lure of the mystical amid global chaos; darker, more primal concerns take over from coolly cerebral strategies. With wide-ranging movement styles and themes of “early psychoanalytic theory, occultist beliefs, and premonitions on the onset of world war,” there may be no smarter way of dancing at the precipice.

**When**: Thursday November 16–Saturday November 18 at 8pm  
**Where**: [Danspace Project](http://www.danspaceproject.org/?ref=hyperallergic.com) at Saint Mark’s Church (131 East 10th Street, East Village, Manhattan)

*More info* [*here*](http://17.performa-arts.org/events/gillian-walsh?ref=hyperallergic.com)*.*