Trajal Harrell & Sarah Sze
Visual Art, Choreography, and The Practice of Performance

Visual Art, Choreography, and The Practise of Performance This workshop will explore, question, and generate new parameters of choreographic practice through an intense examination of performance coming out of both: the visual art world, on the one hand, and the dance world influenced by visual art, on the other hand. Through video screenings, critical dialogue, and composition exercises, participants will be guided to increased awareness of pivotal questions and ideas uniting contemporary dance and visual art such as the architecture of the body in space, text as image, the site-specific, objects as subjects in performance, social experience as content and form, durational time, and the facile versus the obsessive, a.o. Alongside working as a group and individually in an attempt to re-create another version of a seminal work of performance, we will each day generate original material and works that expand our choreographic language and invest us in our individual curiosities that lie between the un-described territory of what a work of ________ (art/dance/choreography/performance/fill-in-the-blank) can be. Trajal Harrell Trajal Harrell is a dancer-choreographer primarily based in New York City. His choreographic works have been seen at Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, and PS122 in NYC as well as Art Basel-Miami Beach, and most recently in Europe at Melkweg (Amsterdam), CNDC Angers, and upcoming this spring at In Transit Festival (Berlin). As a dancer, he performed in the New York-version of Alain Buffard’s Mauvais Genre. He has been an artist-in-residence at The White Oak Residency and Dance Center, Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier Languedoc-Rousillon, Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté à Belfort, Centre National de Danse Contemporaine Angers, Bennington College, Movement Research, and Tanzwerkstatt-Berlin. In 2007, he was awarded a FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance) grant to support the creation and presentation of "Showpony" and the development of "Quartet for the End of Time" at the above mentioned french choreographic centres. "Quartet for the End of Time"premiered in October 2008 at Dance Theater Workshop and was chosen by TimeOut-NY Magazine as one of the best dances of 2008. During 2009, Trajal will be in residency in Belgium at Workspace Brussels and Wp Zimmer (Antwerp). Consistently active in artist-led curatorial and educational initiatives at Movement Research in New York, currently, he is director of special projects and the guest artist editor-in-chief of The Movement Research Performance Journal. He is also working as the New York team leader for the Prisma Forum in Mexico this summer. There, he will present his work "Showpony", head the Prisma publication, and co-direct The Dance Community Picture Mexico City project with photographer David Bergé. Last year, he was appointed as co-artistic mentor with DD Dorvillier for the 2008 DanceWEB program at ImPulsTanz. He is currently working on a series of new performance projects in collaboration with visual artists (including Sarah Sze) to premiere at The New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Performa Biennial in New York City. Sarah Sze Since the late 1990s Sarah Sze's signature sculptural aesthetic has presented ephemeral installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings and burrow into the ground. The artist creates immense, yet intricate site-specific works which manipulate every space - be that a gallery, domestic interior or street corner - and profoundly affects the way it is viewed. Sze’s work can be found in both public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Fondation Cartier Collection (Paris). She has had recent solo shows at Victoria Miro Gallery (London), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and Baltic (New Castle). Sze received a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2005, and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2003. She currently lives and works in New York.