Danspace Project’s Platform 2015: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, curated by writer and critic Claudia La Rocco, explored the poet-as-critic tradition; the overlapping dance lineages of George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Judson Dance Theater; and their continued and complicated influence on choreographic practice today.

Please read La Rocco’s reflection on the 2015 Platform, written first in 2020, and edited and published today in anticipation of the Platform 2015 reunion program, as a part of Danspace @ 50: The Work is Never Done. Sanctuary Always Needed.

Five years ago, for a book that never materialized, I was asked to reflect on Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, Danspace Project’s Platform 2015, and on my role as guest curator and editor of the accompanying catalogue. Then I lived in California, now I live in Maine; was I really once so deeply involved in New York City’s various dance worlds? What follows is some of what I wrote in 2020, whoever I was then, reoriented and/or countermanded by who I am now.[1] Danspace Executive Director and Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor, has described the larger work of the Platform series as troubling history even while you celebrate it; it’s an awkward indulgence when the history is also yours. 

The first memory that comes to mind now is not of an artist directly involved with the project but of the singular dancer Valda Setterfield, striding from the audience to chat with Perry Silvey, then New York City Ballet’s production stage manager. Mallets in hand, Perry was installing D’Anser, the touring stage he helped design for City Ballet and which Yve Laris Cohen placed over the sanctuary floor as part of his platform commission. Perry was clad in workman black, Valda resplendent in fitted vibrant red pants and matching turtleneck sweater belted at the waist. Two tall, lithe figures, their shocks of white hair inclined toward each other.

Storied individuals and hallowed floors: the quartet encapsulated many of the themes in Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, which emanated from the New York nodes of Balanchine, Judson, and Cunningham. Indeed, Valda embodied those three dance traditions all on her own. But I think I see her so vividly there in large part because she’s no longer here. Valda, a Danspace stalwart alongside her husband, the choreographer David Gordon, died in 2023.

Her passing followed David’s, and those of Douglas Crimp, Sam Miller, David Vaughan, and Bill Berkson. Dancers, Buildings… aspired to the generous and generative tradition of the poet-critic, particularly Edwin Denby, from whom the Platform borrowed its title, among other things. And it paid homage to the New York art traditions that formed and sustained me as a writer — traditions unimaginable to me without these individuals. Bill and Sam, both fine poet-critics, were present at the first event, a Poetry Project tribute to Denby, Bill reading and Sam taking notes, as he did on so many opening nights. And Douglas and David Vaughan, writers of much fine scholarship and criticism, lent their words to the catalogue, as did David Gordon, about whom so much (fine and unfine) scholarship and criticism has been written. 

Douglas graced us with his presence night after night in the church, delighted by the ballet invasion. He wrote to me in subsequent weeks when he spied ballet dancers at downtown shows: You succeeded in making downtown the place to be for the ballet dancers! Looking through the catalogue just now, I came across these lines from his conversation with the writer and editor David Velasco, echoing my memory of Valda and Perry: “When I was new to New York and living in Chelsea in the late 1960s, I used to see Denby around the neighborhood regularly. He was such a poignant presence, so beautiful with his shock of white hair, always so impeccably dressed in perfectly tailored if fraying jackets. I continued to see him at downtown dance and performance events either in the audience or as a participant.”

I miss these people. I miss the untroubled knowledge of their existence in the world, living tethers to long-departed figures and movements who shaped the world I entered. History exists in our short and beautiful lives, and we in it; certainly I had a sense of this ten years ago, but I didn’t understand — I didn’t feel — how the whole sweep is carried within the complex and contradictory lives of individuals. The whole thing is impossibly tender, so fragile yet so durable. There will be, there are, other elders, but they will not be mine.


Five years ago, I wrote these notes:

The pleasure and weariness of being in the church day after day, night after night. And for months before that, all those expansive meetings in that little office, across the avenue and up the stairs. How cold it often was, and snowy, on the walk across town from West 4th to the church. Stopping at Joe’s on Carmine for a slice of hot perfection. Love letter to New York. The beauty of pedestrians cutting myriad paths through the avenues. Uptown venturing downtown. Downtown receiving uptown. The making and unmaking of dances. That last day, woozy exhaustion and slowly dawning grief. Judy sending me home with a bouquet; the many lessons in her thoughtful, big-hearted leadership. The performances are a rich blur. Details surface randomly, too many and too few to be any sort of stand in for the experience. 


Dancers, Buildings… was shaped around six arranged duos and one solo commission, Pam Tanowitz, who, working publicly with a crew of intrepid dancers from Cunningham and City Ballet lineages, made a dance in one glorious day. “My” duos were Emily Coates and Yve Laris Cohen, Adrian Danchig-Waring and Silas Riener, Kaitlyn Gilliland and Will Rawls, Sterling Hyltin and Jodi Melnick, Sara Mearns and Rashaun Mitchell, and Jillian Peña and Troy Schumacher. Of course, the artists had their own ideas. Emily and Yve shared an evening but made separate works. Adrian and Silas worked together but Silas ultimately created a solo, necessitated by the mercilessness of City Ballet scheduling. And Sterling, Jodi, Sara, and Rashaun joined forces. I find now that I don’t want to describe or analyze the works these artists made (to in any way be a critic) — in part because what stands out to me feels private, but more so because a final product was never what I asked for. I asked them to try something, to share and to teach and to wrangle, to risk. I found their answers beautiful then and, returning to them now through Howard Silver’s documentary footage, I find them beautiful still.   

Various artists involved in Dancers, Buildings… have gone on to work with each other, or with folks outside of their traditions. Perhaps the Platform had something to do with that, but who’s to say? Change comes slowly, along circuitous paths. Even when it seems to come fast, it’s usually only that you didn’t notice or weren’t privy to the quiet work which allowed for that change. I remember at the time I very much resisted labeling the commissioned artists, makers or doers, desiring to have them all on “the same level,” insisting that they could all be authors. Wanting that for them, even if they didn’t want it for themselves (why should they?!) — and how that wanting revealed my biases around dancer-choreographer hierarchies even as I trumpeted my disdain for them. 

Biases. Here is a quote from Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, in a 2008 article I wrote for The New York Times about Dianne McIntyre, a much loved teacher and choreographer: “If you didn’t feel connected to the downtown scene, which was mostly white but not completely, or if you weren’t drawn to the Ailey scene, which was powerful and beautiful but which wasn’t where my heart lay, then Dianne was the other hub.”

A hub is an awful lot like a node. 

Jawole goes on to discuss why Dianne hasn’t gotten the same attention as folks coming out of, say, the Judson tradition: “Certainly, race had a lot to do with it […] At that time white people were frightened to come to Harlem. So many things were very different about that time in terms of understanding what Dianne was doing: being connected to African-American thinking and aesthetics, but also just being on the vanguard of creative thinking. I think there wasn’t a champion, like Deborah Jowitt was a champion for postmodern dance.”

Critic as champion and connector, yes; critic also as obfuscator, as weak link. Dancers, Buildings… concluded its performance offerings with a party, “Houses Without Masters,” that sought, in part, to acknowledge the many New York traditions not represented in its focus. Jean Butler, Chrybaby Cozie, Michelle Dorrance, Javier Ninja, YACKEZ, Elena Zahlamnn: a handful of artists embodying and expanding on such traditions as tap, voguing, litefeet, and step dancing, and that just the tip of the New York artistic iceberg.  

At some point during the Platform, I learned certain people were upset that a critic had been invited in as a curator. I didn’t (couldn’t) fully appreciate this upset in the moment; it takes so long to understand how many fault lines there are in any one idea of community. You can feel deeply embedded — you can be deeply embedded — and also be an interloper. Individual relationships and personalities affect but do not upend structures (particularly the deeply embedded ones). Such tensions are what make community-based work so maddening and so meaningful.

Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets grew out of an anecdote about Denby teaching people how to see.[2] It’s been clear to me for many years now that I learned how to see (and therefore how to write) by watching dance, by trying to translate that slippery art form into my porous one. Serving as guest curator for this Platform remains a great privilege of my career. I am grateful to the people, past and present, who collectively constitute Danspace Project, and to the art and artists they serve.