Countdown to Gala 2017, Day 50: Excerpts from Issue #1 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 Issue #50 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 #1 was released in Fall 1990. 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#1: The First Issue
Editor’s Note
Editor: Richard Elovich
And speaking of artists, why is it that more dancers don’t practice the art of writing about their work? There’s a long tradition of literacy among painters, composers, etc., and I see practically nothing on dance by dancers in public places. Jill Johnston, 1965
With this first issue of Movement Research, we open a new public space for the New York performance community: a textual space in which artists can develop a critical relationship to the work being produced around us. If we want to further the forms of dance and performance, we need to be prepared to analyze and contextualize our own work, as well as the work of our predecessors and contemporaries. American dance has brought itself to a heightened kinetic intelligence, but we have had much more difficulty articulating our relationship to philosophic and social concerns. Recognizing a real lack of opportunity for choreographers, dancers, writers, musicians, and performers to engage in each others’ work analytically, we have created Movement Research as a slightly anarchic forum in which opposing ideas and aesthetics can be seriously developed and debated.
In an attempt to provide a historical context for writing on performance, we have reprinted past articles by Richard Schechner and Jill Johnston. At the same time, we want this space to be available to writers of varying experience. This forum gives us an opportunity to grapple, perhaps clumsily at first, with the practice of writing about dance and performance. In a time when the arts and artists are seriously under attack, a dialogue among artists develops both the rigorous introspection and the larger commitment of community, creating a vision necessary for survival.
This first issue of Movement Research is the product of a lot of volunteer effort and time. Obviously, we need money to continue. Checks are welcome, and ideas for sources of support are particularly helpful. All contributions are appreciated and are tax-deductible to the full extent allowed by law. People who are not in a position to make direct financial contributions are invited to donate their time — we need all sorts of volunteers.
As you can see from the pull-out calendars, we are continuing to expand our schedule of workshops and performances. For those who have been with us and those who are joining us, here is a rundown of what we have been doing, where our commitments lie and where we are headed.
The 22 workshops this fall and winter feature choreographers, performers, and directors representing a wide range of new and experimental work. Through these workshops, artists learn from other artists, while dances and dance ensembles are created. Workshops by Simone Forti and Lisa Nelson will lead to performances by the participants. Workshops with Steve Paxton, Eiko & Koma, Dana Reitz, Susan Klein, Yvonne Meier, Bill Irwin, and Danny Lepkoff, among others give students direct access to the primary source of a creative technique.
With funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, we are entering the second year of our Residency Project, supporting the work of Arthur Aviles, Simone Forti, Yvonne Meier, Jennifer Monson, David Zambrano, Nelson Zayas, and the Improv Collective (John Jasperse, Clarinda MacLow, Jennifer Lacey, Conor McTeague, and DD Dorvillier). The Residency provides rehearsal subsidies, work-in-progress performances, teaching opportunities and commissioning funds for the creation of new work.
In the last year, we have doubled our Presenting Series weekends, found funding for musicians performing live in collaboration with choreographers, and have lowered our ticket price to $5 to make these performance events more accessible.
Movement Research, Inc. is an artist-run organization committed to the exploration of new ideas in dance and performance. By presenting the artist as primary resource (instructor, panelist, writer, curator, typist), we support a comprehensive approach to dance and performance.
Richard Elovich, 1991
Back Page quote:
“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility… We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions — if they are to be moral — is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success.” He added that that was why he had “ultimately decided — after resisting for a long time — to accept the burden of political responsibility.” Vaclav Havel addressing the United States Congress last February.
Artwork/AIDSwork — and Beyond
by Jim Eigo
I am a writer. Most of the last three years of my life have been devoted not to art work but to AIDS work. Most of the previous decade I wrote fiction. Before that I wrote for theater. Before I wrote for theater I acted. Most of the AIDS work I do involves writing and speaking; I draw on the skills I developed when I did art work.
In November 1987 I joined New York City’s only (and the nation’s first) AIDS activist organization, ACT UP. Every Monday evening, 500 of the most impassioned and informed people I’ve ever encountered meet to plan strategy and swap information. Thousands more aid us in other ways. I do most of my work with the Treatment and Data committee. Forty of us track the progress of investigational AIDS drugs through the research and approval processes and advise ACT UP’s general membership on actions to take to advance our treatment goals.
In the last 2 years alone we’ve played a part in the institution of a federal registry of AIDS-related clinical trials, in making several AIDS drugs generally available, and in codifying a government policy for making potentially effective AIDS drugs available to people who have no treatment alternatives. The Treatments Agenda that we released at the 1989 International AIDS Conference, calling for new ways to prove that drugs are safe and effective, has been more or less embraced by a group of statisticians from inside and outside the government.
And we use our voices more basically in ACT UP’s frequent street demonstration. Non-violent protest has an honored history in this country. ACT UP is part of that tradition. Gay people growing up in this society are asked to internalize a system of repression and shame that would render them invisible. Those of us in ACT UP who are gay, and our colleagues who are not gay, are acutely aware that this invisibility and its companion, silence, have conspired in the deaths of many of our friends and lovers. Those of us in the AIDS activist movement who go into the streets and commit acts of civil disobedience are there in part to register a presence that will not so easily go away, knowing that our bodies and our voices are ultimately our only weapons against those who’d render us invisible. In the course of my activist work, I’ve been arrested four times, convicted one (pending appeal), and sad to say, I see no end in sight.
AIDS activism began in March 1987 because it became necessary. Early in the AIDS crisis, when local and federal governments were of little or no relief, my community responded by designing and funding all the initial AIDS service and education programs. By and large, my community still staffs and funds these programs. But by 1987 it was clear to many of us in the community that the AIDS crisis would never end unless community members began to deal with it in its starkest political dimension: the AIDS crisis had been allowed to happen because it was perceived to exclusively affect traditionally despised and marginalized minorities; gay men, intravenous drug users, and more and more, people of color of all ages and persuasions. After we’d articulated that gross political reality, some of us began to look at a narrower one: if left to the medical establishment as constituted, therapies for AIDS and its related infections and cancers wouldn’t reach the market until most of the people then infected with disease were dead or irreversibly debilitated.
I came slowly to AIDS activism. I had never traveled in gay circles, but in artistic and literary circles. Most of my time was reserved for my work, a solitary process. But I am also a long-term resident of the section of Manhattan known as Alphabet City; by the early eighties, more heroin was being cut in my neighborhood than anywhere in the world. And I am a gay man. So that, in the last decade I have seen my neighborhood and my profession devastated by AIDS and my kind decimated. in 1987, from my perch on Avenue A, the frontier of a devastated neighborhood, wholly contained within our country’s richest congressional district, you didn’t have to be particularly perspicacious to realize something stunk. And from where I sit today, although there have been some changes in the way we do things, I believe we still have to measure our success in AIDS research by the number of new effective therapies we deliver to those who need them. By that measure, I believe that, despite the progress activists have made, particularly in the area of drug research and approval, things still stink.
The government will say that drugs have never been developed so quickly as with AIDS; I will tell you that in some neighborhoods of this country people have never died so often so young of diseases so ugly as cryptosporidiosis, in which people can actually defecate themselves to death, or of MAI, in which the daily cycle of spiking fever, drenching sweats and wracking chills can literally drive a person to distraction [sic], or of a peripheral neuropathy which can spread and spread until bit by bit it shuts the body down. Give us this day our daily death and forgive me if I sometimes sound bitter. But I have a face in my mind for every AIDS-related condition I can describe to you, and sometimes several faces, everyone the face of a friend either living or dead. When the CDC can estimate that one in four young men in NYC hospitals is HIV-infected, and when the process by which we test and approve therapies is so suffocatingly slow, I can see little quick relief from the cycle of sickness and death that for a decade now has drained my community and rendered our culture incalculable poorer.
But what does this have to do with you readers who are, for the most part I guess, performing artists. Most of my friends with AIDS have been artists. At the time of their AIDS diagnoses, most had no health insurance. Several have had to wait until they are eligible for Medicaid. In the interim, they deteriorate.
The same social forces that have conspired to price us out of our performing spaces and would censor our expression are those forces that have prevented people with AIDS from receiving top-notch health care. I believe that the struggle of people with AIDS and the struggle of progressive artists is the same. I believe that the forces shaping the status quo, being historical, can be changed and that we as an articulate community should be initiating that change. I don’t have to tell you how hard AIDS has hit the downtown art scene. I’m not asking that you go and create only overtly political art (whatever that is). I will ask that you keep people with AIDS in mind and that, as members of this society, you join us activists in holding our leaders accountable for the devastation of whole cities and the decimation of whole communities. The federal government is supposed to provide for the common defense. In the current health crisis, my neighborhood and many like it have been left utterly defenseless. A government that through its neglect permits the slow bleed of a large minority of its citizens has ignored its charge and forfeits its right to govern. Virtually all the rest of the industrialized world has secured the right to basic care. It’s up to us to do what we can to help America catch up — phase one of a long overdue domestic perestroika.
