Movement Research, one of the world’s leading laboratories for the investigation of dance and movement-based forms, returns to Danspace Project with its annual Fall Festival.

The Movement Research Festival Fall 2015: VANISHING POINTS, curated by Beth Gill and Cori Olinghouse, will feature acclaimed experimentalists, highlighting and juxtaposing their varied investigations into the artistic currents of dance and performance. The Festival will also include additional events during the week of November 30 – December 7, as well as workshops taught by Festival artists.

“…this festival is imagined as a place of inquiry rather than a space of knowing; a frame for observing how artists are grappling with memory, the ghosts of various traditions, and how the material of the body is mined to subversively complicate, distort, confuse and reveal meaning.” – Beth Gill and Cori Olinghouse ( Read the curatorial statement )

Thursday, December 3, 8pm
Nelisiwe Xaba

Xaba is a contemporary South African artist whose dancing narrates the political, racial and sexual movement through which South African female bodies have been choreographed since colonial times.– Annalisa Piccirillo

Born in Soweto and based in Johannesburg, the celebrated contemporary choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba will present an evening of solo work, reimagined for Danspace Church’s historic performance site.

Friday, December 4, 8pm
Abby Zbikowski & Gwen Welliver

What can be transmitted through motion, through the material of the body? What is kinetic imagination? How can the body suggest meaning beyond abstraction?

Gwen Welliver – What a Horse!
Welliver continues to embrace both formalism and fantasy in her work, What a Horse! Inspired by artist Paul Klee’s image of the same name (Was Fur ein Pferd!, 1929), Welliver and her collaborators lift the image from the page into the dimensions of dance, with all the real and imaginary states that this implies.

Abby Zbikowski – double nickels on the dime
double nickels on the dime exists in a space that questions the vast playing field of contemporary dance and aggressively asks, “How can it be leveled to speak to multiple populations simultaneously and where do these accompanying aesthetics have the right to be seen?” Its highly physical and driving movement vocabulary is fueled by the energy and ethos of punk and hip-hop. Dancers fully commit their bodies and minds as they work through overcoming the odds of physical failure and self-doubt to discover ways of moving and being in the world that transcend the expectations that surround the dancing body.

Saturday, December 5, 8pm
Impossible Dances: Past and Future

Where idea and actuality collide.
Where the past and future join forces. – Melinda Ring

This evening of performance will entangle two different Festival proposals posed to artist Melinda Ring that resurface past work of hers through a reconstruction and construction in-progress. Proposal #1 asks Melinda to gift her 1999 Impossible Dance #2 (still life)to an emerging dance artist, Kai Kleinbard. Proposal #2 is for Melinda to revisit Impossible Dance #2, through the assembling of its original set design and to use this historical site for her current choreographic investigations with performers Talya Epstein, Maggie Jones, and Molly Lieber.