PASSING PEAKS A SERIES OF PERFORMATIVE INDIVIDUATIONS, 11th Performance Project at LISTE Art Fair Basel, June 15 20, 2015, curated by Eva Birkenstock Trajal Harrell Antigone Jr. ++ / Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (Plus) with Trajal Harell und Thibault Lac June 16, 7 PM Presented in cooperation with Kaserne Basel!
PASSING PEAKS A SERIES OF PERFORMATIVE INDIVIDUATIONS, 11th Performance Project at LISTE Art Fair Basel, June 15 20, 2015, curated by Eva Birkenstock Trajal Harrell Antigone Jr. ++ / Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (Plus) June 16, 7PM Kaserne Basel (Rossstall 1) Klybeckstrasse 1b (see map in the back) Admission CHF 15 (starticket.ch, or +41 61 666 6000) Choreographer: Trajal Harrell Dancers: Trajal Harrell, Thibault Lac Dramaturg: Gérard Mayen Sound Designer: Trajal Harrell Co-production and Residency: Menagerie de Verre- Paris, Workspace Brussels, Pact Zollverein - Essen. Antigone Jr. Plus Plus is the PLUS size in the Twenty Looks series*. In American and English naming tradition, a junior (jr.) is the son of a father with the same name. Thus, with Antigone jr., the New York choreographer Trajal Harrell purposely scales down Sophocles' tragedy to playwright s first scene depicting the relationship between Antigone and her sister Ismene; and their tragic fate. Antigone Jr. confronts the postmodern antagonism against tragically dramatic dance epitomized by Martha Graham's mythological Greek dramas by presenting this contemporary dance version of Sophocles' "Antigone". By imagining a theoretical meeting between Voguing and Post-modern dance, much of Yvonne Rainer's 1965 "No Manifesto" is put into crisis. Most of the no's become definite maybe's: maybe to spectacle, maybe to transformations and magic and make-believe, maybe to the glamour and the transcendency of the star image, maybe to the heroic, maybe to involvement of performer or spectator, maybe to style, maybe to trash imagery, maybe to camp, maybe to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer, and maybe to moving or be moved. The only thing we know for sure is yes to the heroic and we're adding yes to the tragic. Trajal Harrell s work has been presented In New York and the U.S. at many venues including The Kitchen, New York Live Arts, TBA Festival, Walker Arts Center, American Realness Festival, ICA Boston, Danspace Project, Crossing the Line Festival, DTW, P.S. 122, Cornell University, Colorado College, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and Los Angeles RedCat Theater. His work has been presented in international festivals such as Festival d Automne (Paris), Rencontres Chorégraphiques (Paris), Festival d Avignon, Impulstanz (Vienna), TanzimAugust (Berlin), Panorama Festival (Rio de Janeiro). He has also shown performance work in visual art contexts such as MoMA, Perfoma Biennial, MoMA PS1, Fondation Cartier (Paris), The New Museum (NYC), The Margulies Art Warehouse (Miami), The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Serralves Museum (Porto), Centre Pompidou- Metz, Centre Pompidou-Paris, ICA Boston, The Rosa de la Cruz Collection and Art Basel- Miami Beach. He has been a receipient of fellowships from The Saison Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, Art Matters Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Doris Duke Foundation. Most recently, he began a new research examining butoh dance from the theoretical praxis of voguing. This latest work, Used Abused and Hung Out to Dry, premiered at The Museum of Modern Art- MoMA in February 2013, where he has begun a two-year residency further developing this new body of work.
PASSING PEAKS A SERIES OF PERFORMATIVE INDIVIDUATIONS, 11th Performance Project at LISTE Art Fair Basel, June 15 20, 2015, curated by Eva Birkenstock Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church The Series Between 2008-2013 Trajal Harrell created and collaborated on a seminal body of work- The Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church series. The works take a new critical position on postmodern dance aesthetics emanating from the Judson Church period. By developing his own work as an imaginary meeting between the aesthetics of Judson and those of a parallel historical tradition, that of Voguing, Trajal Harrell re-writes the minimalism and neutrality of postmodern dance with a new set of signs. "What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?" is the central question uniting all the pieces in the series. Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning... has henceforth been produced in seven sizes of performances, from extra small (XS) to made-to-measure (M2M). The eight size, an (XL) publication will eventually follow these performance works. Rather than illustrating a historical fiction, these new works transplant the question/proposition into a contemporary context. The series has become internationally renown, and continues to tour worldwide to festivals, theaters, and museums. All the sizes of THE SERIES have been shown together twice in history - at the 2013 Impulstanz Vienna International Dance Festival and at The Kitchen in September 2014 as part of Crossing the Line Festival 2014.