Juliana F. May creates dances that interrogate the relationship between trauma and abstraction, or broadly speaking, between content and form. Her experimentation with structural dissonance often pushes narrative to the point where language falls apart, where meaning emerges not as the result of formulaic dramatic logics, but as tactile texture and visceral feeling. When I […]
This article revisits, revises, and expands on the arguments I make in Blackface and Pop Princesses: A Brief Genealogy. Previously, I wrote three brief paragraphs on Ariana Grande, trying to position her donning of black and brown visuality (i.e. blackface/brownface) alongside similar practices of other pop princesses such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Miley Cyrus. […]
This article is originally published on Anomaly. The dancing-sexing body terrorizes the fantasy of an asexual beauty that the concert dancing body aspires to. The concert dancing body purges itself of sex, of the mundane, of the fleshy, and literally of flesh, in order to attain the precarious status of (white) Art, that which is […]
No to the natural No to the ephemeral No to the neutral No to the habitual No to politics (but not the political) No to the authentic (but not the personal) No to new aesthetics (but not the experimental) No to polemics (but not the radical) No to the division between process and product No to […]
The perfect dance critic does not exist. […] The perfect dance critic knows when it’s time to quit, change careers or retire. -Miguel Gutierrez, The Perfect Dance Critic Let’s be honest first, I am no expert on this matter. A 23 year-old college graduate, I have never landed any sort of stable jobs in dance criticism. […]
Cult Plastic 