Welcome to Danspace Project’s Online Journal, issue 14: The Dream of the Audience (Part II), dedicated to Danspace Project’s Platform 2022. Issue #14 will focus on Platform lines of inquiry, artists research and writing, and feature Platform catalogue excerpts, video excerpts, and responses from Writer-in-Residence, Maura Nguyen Donohue and Artist-in-Residence, Gyun Hur.

Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II) [April 23 – June 11] features new premieres by mayfield brooks, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, iele paloumpis, and Ogemdi Ude, marking Danspace’s 15th Platform to date and a return to live performances in the sanctuary at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.

Platform 2022, curated by Danspace Project Executive Director & Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor, follows its 2021 predecessor (featuring Eiko Otake, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Reggie Wilson, and Okwui Okpokwasili), building on impossible questions as we continue to navigate precarious times. Like Part I, Platform 2022 takes inspiration from a 1977 poem by the late artist and writer, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), wherein she addresses the audience “as a distant relative.” Platform 2022 delves into ancestral explorations, connections, and disconnections, as well as accessibility, and disability aesthetics, sustainable relationships to land, site, and water, and how these connections find their way into the artists’ choreographic work. Dance artists mayfield brooks, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, iele paloumpis, and Ogemdi Ude have each noted different considerations of time amidst the ongoing Pandemic. Considering the intersections between life and dancing, how do life practices — building, birthing, weaving, planting, surviving — feed into dancemaking?

Along with live performances, Platform 2022 features two Conversations Without Walls:  The Dream of the Artist & The Dream of the Audience.

Danspace Project’s Platforms are also always accompanied by a print publication, and this Platform continues in that legacy—The Dream of The Audience was written to both reflect on Platform 2021 and anticipate Platform 2022 with written contributions by the artists, Hussie-Taylor, and Writer-in-Residence (2021 & 2022), Maura Nguyen Donohue.