The Dossier Charrette: a series of working dance essays by Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez, Angie Pittman, and Edisa Weeks (Platform 2018) – Danspace Project
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The Dossier Charrette: a series of working dance essays by Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez, Angie Pittman, and Edisa Weeks (Platform 2018)

The Dossier Charrette: a series of working dance essays is inspired by the notion of an architectural  charrette , a collaborative and intense period of design or planning activity, which emerged out of the École des Beaux-Arts in late 19th Century Paris. The word charrette is French for “cart” or “chariot.” Architecture students rushed to complete their work in an allotted time period as professors made the rounds with carts to collect the students’ final projects. This practice came to be referred to as working en charrette, “’in the cart.”

Over three nights, artists Beth Gill, Jonathan Gonzalez, Miguel Gutierrez, Angie Pittman, and Edisa Weeks each present their own 10-minute artistic response to a dossier compiled by scholar Prithi Kanakamedala whose research interests include the Black Atlantic, New York’s nineteenth-century free Black communities, and the city’s historic material culture.

The responses are meant to evolve over the course of the three evenings. Each evening is followed by “refraction and reflection” between the artists and Wilson, deepening the engagement between the artists and facilitating engagement with the audience.

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