In October 2018, I read a widely-shared article on Dance Magazine titled “We Need to Talk About Non-Consensual Audience Participation.” The author Lauren Wingenroth criticized Boris Charmatz’s choreography 10000 Gestures, especially the section where the sweaty and half-naked performers got off the proscenium stage and climbed all over the audience members at the NYU Skirball […]
Initially published as a double essay on American Theatre Magazine, the text was originally followed by Rad Pereira’s writing, with both of us trying to respond to the editorial prompts around queer mentorship. If Rad delved more into their personal experience as a queer mentor, I focus on the abstract yet material structure of mentorship […]
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 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 […]
Cult Plastic 