This is the first of 3 development events scheduled throughout this spring/summer in preparation for Neo-Judson program residencies throughout the Fall of 2016 and winter of 2017, with multiple anticipated final program premiers throughout 2017 and into 2018. These programs will reinterpret the legacy of Judson in light of the Postmodern philosophy credited with its inception. Read the extended details below:

 

PREMIERE NIGHT PERFORMANCES April 8, 2016, 6pm-1am

Produced with the generous support of The Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Audience Architects and Links Hall.

Concurrent with the "Personal Preferences" private collection exhibit, a selective number of performance art and dance works will be presented. The Judson Church scene, long recognized as its own seedbed in the development of important dance and performance works, from Carolee Schneeman to Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton and numerous others, is ripe for reimagining. For more information on the Private Preferences collection exhibit, please visit the separate event at https://www.facebook.com/events/1661946530714882/

Seedbeds 1 is presented as preparation for an ongoing series of performances that will serve as investigation into the familiar Judson Church moment in dance history. The Seedbeds program is meant as a petri dish event to develop ideas and direction for a later program exploring a new-wave Judson event HOME & Hung Jury has been pitching to Links Hall and elsewhere. One of the major anti-canonical goals is to pair critics and dancers to produce a unique program of performances, and for the critics to write essays on that dancer's work which will then be published in a book alongside interviews with founding Judson members. To that end, we have already secured interviews, for instance, with Deborah Hay, Simone Forti and Carolee Schneemann, among others. This will be dance and art history in the making.

"Seedbeds" aims to develop a Neo-Judson program that goes further into the philosophical background of Judson than has previously been explicated, primarily by delving deeply into its well-acknowledged background influences in Postmodernism. It seems a predominate notion that it was widely critically accepted as an anti-canonical guiding light, though the particularities of that philosophy, and of the notions it sought to advance are often, and often explicitly, not the predominate concerns of its dance-historical practitioners. It's a compelling dichotomy, what the philosophy and the practice, in a more perfect alignment, may yield toward a more radical re-imagining of both. To this end, we will also organize events, including discussions and presentations with speakers from the philosophy community.

Chicago's often grass roots intellectual seedbeds have long been recognized as birthplace of critically transformative ideas, not just in science, economics, and social services, for instance, but also across the range of artistic disciplines. And, given dance's largely uninvestigated contemporary roots in Postmodernist philosophical inquiry, the understanding of the art form as a calling seems ripe for a cyclical and, hopefully, perhaps even revolutionary shift to a seedbed of the Neo-Judson Church school.

This is a timely consideration, in-particular for dance, but also across the artistic disciplines: in recent years, Postmodernist architecture has been readily demolished in Chicago, for instance, inviting a reevaluation of its tenents in our cultural memory, as well as what is lost in its erasure from future cityscapes. There is also the socio-political component of Postmodernist thinking, and the struggle against "master" narratives that has arguably contributed to much of the civil advancements of the post-aughts. Following on this architectural notion of “living space,” it might be useful to consider the growing struggle over homeless' rights in the city, who are similarly being driven from public lands in the interest of economic development.

Drawing on a wide variety of disciplines, rooted in Humanist curatorial ideals, Seedbeds prepares the groundwork for the staging of an expansive re-imagining of dance rooted in its own performance art and movement study histories, and inclusive of influences from poetry, architecture, cinema, literature, art and others. Its challenge will be primarily to investigate and re-envision the original Judson scene against its Postmodernist backgrounds, as channeled through the curatorial selection of the dance and performances work by an astute group of contemporaries.

About Curator Michael Workman