American Realness

Trajal Harrell

Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M)

SUN JAN 13 . 3:00 PM

Run time: 55 minutes

MoMA PS1*
22-25 Jackson Ave / $10 / momaps1.org

*Presented as a part of MoMA PS1 Sunday Sessions

Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M) is the custom-made size in the Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church project. Only, in this made-to-measure size, the proposition is inverted and the central question of the work becomes “What would have happened if one of the early postmoderns from Judson Church had gone uptown to perform in the voguing ballroom scene in Harlem.”

In Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem…(M2M), Harrell makes a full-evening work for three dancers which engages the formalism and minimalism of postmodern dance with the flamboyancy and performativity of voguing. Combining these contrasting styles, Harrell repositions the influence of jazz, funk, and rhythm-and-blues on improvisation in early postmodern dance. Likewise, aesthetic and social discourses are transformed when the postmodern dance pedestrian vocabulary of sitting and standing are re-imagined in the context of a Judson Church gathering in Harlem.

Co-Production: Danspace Project for Platform 2012: Judson@50, MoMA PS1. Residency support provided by Impulstanz Vienna International Dance Festival The commission for Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M) is made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation and by Danspace Project’s 2012-2013 Commissioning Initiative, which receives major support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.