Posted inArt

Taking Immersive Theater on the Road with Retro Americana

Third Rail Projects has performed their visually creative pieces in the middle of lunch hour at the World Financial Center, in a former hospital in Brooklyn, and in an opera house in upstate New York, bringing modern dance to an audience who might not usually seek it. Now the New York-based performance group is going on a road trip, with a vintage Coleman pop-up camper decked out in 1970s style. Roadside Attraction is a nostalgia-tinged traveling spectacle rolling out this summer that is a tribute to long-haul family excursions.

Posted inPerformance

Happily Tangled Webs

On my way to the Joyce SoHo last Wednesday, while thinking about David Gordon’s 50th anniversary — and realizing that, while he has been making work for five decades, I would be seeing it live for the first time that night — I got to wondering: What does Gordon, renowned for resisting any sort of tidy classification, think about these tidy little landmarks called anniversaries?

Posted inPerformance

Ashes to Ashes, Words to Dance

The program for Rashaun Mitchell’s Nox contains a lone explanatory note: “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” The words belong to the poet Anne Carson, and they come from the back cover of her eponymous book, published in 2010. They make you wonder: Is what we’re about to see a replica of that book, in the form of a dance, as close as the artists could get? A replica of a replica?

Posted inNews

Your Chance to See One of William Wegman’s Dogs Dance

If you’ve ever wanted to see a dancing dog — and not just any dog, but one of William Wegman’s Weimaraners — you’re about to get your chance. Choreographer Karole Armitage has teamed up with a handful of visual artists, including Wegman, Will Cotton, Kalup Linzy and Aïda Ruilova, for a dance-cum-performance-art show at the Abron Arts Center titled “Werk! The Armitage Gone Variety Show.”

Posted inArt

Dancing at the Whitney

When the list of the 2012 Whitney Biennial artists was made public, it included a very interesting trio of names, probably not immediately recognizable to most of the visual arts world: choreographers Sarah Michelson and Michael Clark, and theater director/playwright Richard Maxwell. All three are extremely well known in their respective fields, but how and why are they relevant to the Biennial audience? Hyperallergic asked me to write a series of articles looking at performing arts, not performance art, in the museum context, and whether it’s an important, or completely arbitrary, shift in visual arts programming.