This workshop explores whiteness in the post-modern dance experiment investigating Anna Halprin’s multiracial Reach Out Company, the formation of Judson Dance Theatre and the burgeoning NYC downtown dance scene that morphed from it.
We’ll look at the work and companies of foundational post-modern choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown in light of the social movements that were simultaneously occurring at the time, i.e. the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the women’s movement and somatics to consider the intersection of post-modern dance with race.
We’ll particularly explore Movement Research, a NYC based dance organisation founded in 1978 to curate curriculum, performance and on-going experimentation, with its theoretical and aesthetic roots in the Judson Dance Theatre, in their recent journey to desegregate their organisation.
Racial Decoy seeks to identify models of racial accountability and equity in arts organisations to inspire and generate change in your own local dance community.
This is also an Asana based workshop that will consider Thomas Hanna’s ideas of the three somatic reflexes: green light, red light and trauma to create a fourth reflex, the “woke” reflex.
Sri Louise
