The Flowchart Project: Mapping a History of Contemporary Dance and Choreography

January 10-20, 2013
Gallery Hours Concurrent with festival performances

ABRONS ARTS CENTER CULPEPPER & UPPER MAIN GALLERIES
466 Grand Street

The Bureau for the Future of Choreography is an apparatus–striving for collective authorship–that produces choreographies and documents. Taking inspiration from MoMA Director Alfred Barr’s infamous 1935 Flowchart of Modernism and responses to his gesture, The Bureau initiates The Flowchart Project, an endeavor to collect Flowcharts of Contemporary Dance & Choreography.

What might a flowchart for contemporary dance look like? Where and when does your flowchart for contemporary dance start? Where does it end? What are your ideologies and how do you name them? What are your histories and how do you write them–especially those that have not been formally written?

Visitors to the 2013 American Realness Festival will be invited to participate in the authorship of a decade-to-decade timeline 1960-2020. Draw flowcharts and diagram, rearrange walls of historical signage and categorizations, silkscreen tee shirts and tote bags, rock out to DJ Historical Accumulation and participate in discussions. Festival-goers take the authorship of the histories, legacies and narratives of contemporary dance into their own hands in this participatory exhibition.