Danspace Project Presents
PLATFORM 2015: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets
curated by Claudia La Rocco

Featuring: Kaitlyn Gilliland & Will Rawls, Silas Riener & Adrian Danchig-Waring, Sara Mearns & Rashaun Mitchell, Sterling Hyltin & Jodi Melnick, Jillian Peña & Troy Schumacher, Emily Coates & Yve Laris Cohen, and Pam Tanowitz.

February 11 – March 28, 2015

PLATFORM 2015: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, Danspace Project’s 9th in a series of guest-curated Platforms, was inspired, in part, by the writings of dance critic and poet Edwin Denby and the following excerpt from an essay about the founding of The Poetry Project and Danspace Project:

Toward the end of 1974, a group of dancers calling themselves The Natural History of the American Dancer-Carmen Beuchat, Barbara Dilley, Suzanne Harris, Cynthia Hedstrom, Rachel Lew and Judy Padow-approached Larry Fagin (then Assistant Director of the Project) about the possibility of performing in the Sanctuary [at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery]. Fagin was enthusiastic: he had been a keen dance-watcher for years (shuttling between New York City’s three nodal points of Balanchine, Cunningham and the Judson Dance Theater) and was one of many to credit Edwin Denby with having taught him how to look and see, and for allowing him to make connections between ballet and downtown dance. (from essay by Miles Champion, The Poetry Project website).

The Platform asks how our shared and divergent cultural histories are relevant today. Platform 2015 curator, poet and former New York Times dance critic Claudia La Rocco writes in the forthcoming Platform 2015 catalogue: “This Platform developed out of two ongoing conversations between me and Judy [Hussie-Taylor]: one about how poetry and dance intersect, and one about the lack of meaningful engagement between artists from ballet and contemporary dance…[We] became interested in the idea of Denby and the poet-critic as a possible framework.”

In 2014 six pairs of artists were asked by La Rocco to participate in choreographic exchanges. The participating artists have engaged with each other in person, via email and skype, in the studio and residencies at the Barshynikov Art Center, NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts, Bard Fisher Center, and American Ballet Theatre’s Innovation Initiative. In February and March the artists will be given residencies at Danspace Project inside St. Mark’s Church.

The following excerpt from La Rocco’s curatorial statement provides some context for her pairings.

I responded to the [Edwin Denby] prompt by offering 12 artists from these nodal points (some of whom disagree with me about their relationships to these points), with the idea that they would work in six pairings, artificially created by me, a poor-man’s Denby: Emily Coates and Yve Laris Cohen, Adrian Danchig-Waring and Silas Riener, Sterling Hyltin and Jodi Melnick, Kaitlyn Gilliland and Will Rawls, Sara Mearns and Rashaun Mitchell, Jillian Peña and Troy Schumacher. And then Pam Tanowitz, a full day for Pam…because she is already working in all of these worlds. So we paired her with herself, both on and off the page.

A lot of what sparks my enthusiasm here is curiosity. What would happen if…? I don’t have a sense of what these pairings will come up with, whether or not it will “work” or even will be meant to work, whether it will lead to new things … so those possibilities, those known unknowns or whatever, are exciting in and of themselves.

More info, calendar of events, and tickets at danspaceproject.org.