Countdown to Gala 2017, Day 4: Excerpts from Issue #48 of the Movement Research Performance Journal

The 2017 Movement Research Gala on May 8 will celebrate 25 years of Movement Research at the Judson Church and 50 Issues of the Movement Research Performance Journal. As we count down the days until the Gala, we’re posting #50DaysOfMRPJ with Editor’s Notes and excerpts from each Performance Journal.

Movement Research Performance Journal Issue #48 was released in Spring 2016. You can view the full Table of Contents here.

*The Movement Research Gala will take place Monday, May 8 at 6pm at Judson Memorial Church. For more information, to volunteer or to purchase tickets, click here.

#MRGala2017 #50DaysOfMRPJ

MRPJ#48: Cathy Weis

Editor’s Note

Editor-in-Chief Moriah Evans
Senior Editor Macklin Kowal
Managing Editor Lauren Bakst
Cover Artist Portfolio Editor and Layout Lisa Nelson

How do we access someone’s work through the eyes of another artist? We intentionally engage this practice in the pages here and less intentionally in casual conversations at play in a scene of events.

This issue features many artists who have been working in the Downtown New York scene for decades. Personal histories reveal downtown histories. Several of these discussions are with artists who do not identify as dance artists, but who work alongside of, with, and between dance artists to share alternative perspectives.

In the intimacy of creative processes shared between collaborators, friends or even strangers, how do we react and remember? What kind of viewpoints do we set-up onto each other’s work and practices? What tales are being spun and by whom?

Repetition is inherent to forms of performance — in order to make it and to embody it and to understand it. In time-based art, our perpetual fascination with duration also begs the question of how we wish to spend time together and how do we actually spend time together? Towards whatever dance and performance was, is and can be…

In the pursuit of this form (with or without an audience), people come together to make something transpire in watching, doing. In the inherent generosity of giving and getting attention and of ex- change, there is so much enthusiasm, conviction, and commitment.

In the words of Stanley Love, “We can dance and we are dancing.” Conversations ensue.

— Moriah Evans

What’s not in Cathy Weis’s cover artist portfolio is the foldup centerfold.The interactive thing.That would start off as the comfortable neighborhood of a page, and after you discovered the faint dotted lines and tiny print with possibly surly directions, as a reward for your curiosity you’d have ten giant tatooed claws on the tips of your fingers. I’d said to Cathy, Why not make something that could sit on a table or your head? Like the 3D stained-glass alligator head and sneakers you made to be lampshades back when. How will we turn the next page? Well, it didn’t happen this time. Time constraints.

Working with Cathy is a ticket to serious play. I’ve known that since the day we met in a dance studio at college in ’66. Fast forward to ’73, when our audience for The Green Dream assembled, on a twenty foot dining table in a Victorian mansion, a jigsaw puzzle of Michelangelo’s God and Adam’s fateful touch sketched on forty squares of mirrored glass. Fast forward to 1990, where we unveiled our Abondanza in the Air, a quartet for two women partnering two portable black and whiteTVs sprouting images and sound from our hardly ordinary lives.This anomalous interaction, or if you will, videodance puppetry, brought us eye-to-eye and body-to-body with reality in the dark and dreams in the light. We mapped our discoveries through action with no lofty thoughts about technology as such, just tumbled into the rabbit hole we’d been staring into with genetic fascination since childhood, suddenly putty in our hands. We parsed the unleashed mysteries of moving images, literally and figuratively, for most of a decade, only stopping, before we nailed it, when the tvs got too heavy.

Fast forward to here, for a glimpse behind the curtain of the succeed- ing decades of Cathy’s timeless imagination. Assembling materials for this portfolio with Cathy, our first collaboration in many years, thanks MRPJ for this grand opportunity, we let images and words fall with equal weight on the pages.

— Lisa Nelson, dancer, real-time editor; co-editor of Contact Quarterly since 1977