Issue #58/59

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 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.

Moments Before the Wind is a heterogeneous collection of notes on scenography that offers a glimpse into the poetics and artistic practice of Jozef Wouters. These reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique have developed over the years as they were written out loud in various contexts. Now settling on the page among built and unbuilt spaces, they’re an invitation to the reader to think along or against, and think up space for oneself. Edited by Jeroen Peeters; graphic design by Filiep Tacq.

Jozef Wouters is a scenographer and theatre maker based in Brussels, who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. Decoratelier is also a workplace for set designers and artists, and provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

This publication brings together the texts from the pieces Black (2011), No Title (2014), We to be (2015) and oslo (2017) created and performed by Mette Edvardsen. These pieces have been developed using language as material, looking into the relationship between writing and speaking, between language and voice. Mette Edvardsen is working on the verge of the visible, considering choreography as writing.

Studies on Squats is an evocative exploration of embodied resistance and political movement that uses the multifaceted posture of the “Asian Squat” as a lens through which broader concepts of migration, illness, and resilience are examined. In Studies on Squats, the body—in its most vulnerable and potent states—becomes a speculative site for reclaiming agency by crafting new forms of protest that draw from ancestral strength, humor and eroticism. This posture, rich with cultural resonance, offers as an entry point to imagine ways in which the body can engage in acts of defiance against systems of oppression. Studies on Squats  invites the audience to consider how dance and choreographic thinking can serve as tools for envisioning alternative futures, where artistry empowers those enduring systemic social injustices to transform their realities. 

An encounter between dance and visual arts.

Dance First Think Later - The Thinking Body between Dance and Visual Arts follows on from the exhibition-festival Dance First Think Later - An Encounter between Dance and Visual Arts, presented in Geneva in summer 2020, documenting it with a wealth of iconography and enriching it with a critical, theoretical and historical perspective on the works and the project. Commissioned texts are devoted to the 22 artists, written by authors active in museums, festivals, art schools, independent critics and artists.

The biennial event Dance First Think Later explores the converging fields between dance, performance, visual arts and moving images. Arta Sperto, which is organising and producing the exhibition-festival and publishing the book, is developing a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the operating mechanisms of the visual and performing arts, and the respective characteristics of museums/art centres and theatres/festivals. This approach is motivated by the need to support artists whose cross-disciplinary practices come up against the way in which culture is still largely organised by field, whether in terms of cultural policies, institutions, funding or the media. Starting with the works themselves, the book offers food for thought on cross-disciplinary approaches to the contemporary arts.

With / around Halil Altindere, Alexandra Bachzetsis & Julia Born, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Alex Cecchetti, Clément Cogitore, Dara Friedman, Gerard & Kelly, Marie-Caroline Hominal, Lenio Kaklea, La Ribot, Pierre Leguillon, Xavier Le Roy, Klara Lidén, Melanie Manchot, Olivier Mosset & Jacob Kassay, Samuel Pajand, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Alexandra Pirici, Julien Prévieux, Marinella Senatore, Gregory Stauffer, Barbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca.

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.