Book review: Post-modern vaudeville … from The Grand Union

Dance · Reviews
by 
dilley, arnold, rainer, grand union Ed. note: Guest author Elizabeth Zimmer contributes this review of Wendy Perron‘s new book, The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970-1976. If you miss dance in our time of pandemic-related deprivation, get this book. Wendy Perron, a near-contemporary and sometime colleague of members of the Grand Union, was ...

Still stimulating: ‘The Grand Union’ in 50th anniversary conversation

Dance
A special on-line convocation of a dance-talk series hosted by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Place in New York’s East Village, Conversation Without Walls, will take place November 21. Participants include weighty women of the arts, the dancer and Danspace co-founder, Barbara Dilley, and artist, Yvonne Rainer, and writer, Wendy Perron. To mark the 50th ...

Docu-worthy: Yvonne Rainer in ‘Feelings Are Facts’

Dance · Film
Oh jeez, in our nightmarish ‘new normal,’ an American existence in which mediocrity — so painful in a society in which political freedom enables the pursuit of excellence — rises to unimaginable levels; in which lies and blather pollute our air; in which values that can only be called contemptible predominate, into this setting enter ...

Exhibit spawns critical reassessment of West Coast-rooted pioneers of post-modern dance

Dance · Visual arts
The place to be in the dance world this past weekend was splendiforous Santa Barbara, California, for the opening of “Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972,” an exhibit at UC Santa Barbara’s AD&A Museum. Offering toasts, in photo above, to five years of research and writing, ...

‘Radical Bodies’ in California exhibit and on the streets of New York

Dance · Ideas & Opinion
Politics was not the intended focus of the day-long conference that opened “Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972,” an exhibit at UC Santa Barbara’s AD&A Museum. Art was. The hugely instructive exhibit unearths and traces the influence on American modern dance of three groundbreaking, bi-coastal dancer/choreographers. ...

Fierce women of dance featured in UC Santa Barbara conference

Dance · Ideas & Opinion
We all heard Meryl Streep tell it like it is at the Golden Globes awards. Yes, we did. A courageous woman. We are similarly slated to hear from a group of courageous women of modern dance — they talk with both brain and body. In August 1960, Anna Halprin, at right, taught an experimental workshop ...

Dancers, meet the museum world. Museums: consider dance.

Dance · Visual arts
This weekend, the Hammer Museum presents Dancing with the Art World, a two-day symposium that convenes artists, choreographers, curators, and historians to reflect on the interface between dance and art, consider its historical precedents, and debate its effects on artistic and institutional practice. Dance has long intersected meaningfully with the visual arts. But in recent ...

Ornette Coleman via Shirley Clarke via Ross Lipman

Film · Music
arts·meme friend Ross Lipman, a primo art-film restorationist, clues us into a very cool screening of a documentary directed by the feminist filmmaker Shirley Clarke (Lipman is an expert and advocate of her work) next weekend at the Billy Wilder Theater. It’s “Ornette: Made in America,” to be screened in the mid-stream days of UCLA ...

The courage of Sara Wookey 4

Dance · Ideas & Opinion · Visual arts
The subject is the so-called performance art featuring nude dancers on display as dinner-party decorations at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s fundraising gala in mid-November. Some poked heads thru tables as patrons dined; others lay inert with skeletons draped on their bodies. All women decorating tabletops, mind you. No men. It’s a tired idea that ...

Yo Martha, Martha Graham! Yvonne Rainer wants to teach you something. 1

Dance
Graham was featured as a Google “Doodle” on her birthday today Happy Birthday Martha Graham born in Pittsburgh on May 11, 1894, 117 years ago