METTE INGVARTSEN: 7 PLEASURES US PREMIERE Friday, September 29 at 7:30 pm Saturday, September 30 at 7:30 pm Concept & Choreography: Mette Ingvartsen Performers: Manon Santkin, Johanna Chemnitz, Katja Dreyer, Elias Girod, Bruno Freire, Dolores Hulan, Ligia Lewis, Danny Neumann, Norbert Pape, Pontus Pettersson, Ghyslaine Gau, Marie Ursin (permanently replaced by Gemma Higginbotham) Light: Minna Tiikkainen Music & Soundtrack: Peter Lenaerts, with music by Will Guthrie (Breaking Bones & Snake Eyes) Set: Mette Ingvartsen & Minna Tiikkainen Dramaturgy: Bojana Cvejic Assistant choreography: Manon Santkin Assistant production: Manon Haase Assistant light: Nadja Räikkä Technical director: Joachim Hupfer & Nadja Räikkä Sound technician: Adrien Gentizon Company Management: Kerstin Schroth A production of Mette Ingvartsen / Great Investment Co-production: steirischer herbst festival (Graz), Kaaitheater (Brussels), HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Théatre National de Bretagne (Rennes), Festival d’Automne (Paris), Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Dansens Hus (Oslo), Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), Kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen), Dansehallerne (Copenhagen)
INDEFINITE ARTICLE Mette Ingvartsen: 7 Pleasures By André Lepecki As an experimental art form, dance is concerned with exploring and expanding the limits and the potentialities of its two main constitutive elements: movement and the body. In relationship to the former, contemporary experimental dance is deeply indebted to the pioneering work of the Judson choreographers, who, in the early 1960’s, and literally just one block west from NYU’s Skirball Center, redefined what kinds of new movements dance could include in its repertoire. Those new, unexpected, non-balletic, or nonmodern dance movements, ranged from embracing stillness (as in Steve Paxton’s Proxy, 1961), to choreographing a smooth distribution of gestures and steps so as to create one sole kinetic line (Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A, 1966), or to simply have non-dancers walk across a stage (Steve Paxton Satisfying Lover, 1967). The expansion of dance’s movement vocabulary from mere walking to stillness was instrumental in reshaping European experimental dance in the mid-1990’s – as seen in the important works of Jérôme Bel or La Ribot. But what about that other crucial element for dance, what about dance’s relation to “the body,” in its many capacities, limits, potentialities? Over the past decade, Mette Ingvartsen’s work has offered some important clues on how dance may attend to the body in all its non-kinetic aspects — as a political, sexual, desiring, linguistic, historical, racialized, gendered, and agential flesh matter. Tellingly, since her early pieces, at the beginning of the 2000s, the Danish choreographer, today based in Brussels, has explicitly acknowledged a deep relation with the 1960s’ New York experimental scene. In 2004, Ingvartsen published her “Yes Manifesto” (2004) – a direct reference to Yvonne Rainer’s famous “No Manifesto” (1965). The “Yes Manifesto” is not quite a rebuttal of Rainer’s manifesto, but rather an affirmation of another set of priorities for dance’s experimental drive four
decades later. It states, at a certain point: “Yes to materiality and body practice,” and it concludes with: “Yes to multiplicity, difference and co-existence.” The affirmation of how the materiality of body practices (including sexual practices) are deeply linked to “multiplicity, difference and co-existence,” has characterized Ingvartsen’s entire choreographic work ever since. Her desire to expand what is a body for dance and what sorts of other bodies can do with dance has lead her to create, in the late 2000’s, pieces for objects and things: choreographies where human dancers are literally replaced by foam, vapor, colored lights, melting ice, and sparkling metal confetti; or where human dancers fuse with these matters as to become almost one with them (see the five works composing The Artificial Nature Series, 2009-2012). Lately, Ingvartsen’s investment on the question of the body’s “materiality” has lead her to research one particular element: sexuality. Once again, the experimental New York performance scene of the 1960s becomes crucial source of inspiration. Yet, significantly, Ingvartsen will not look at the Judson choreographers as interlocutors for her approach to sex, sexuality, desire, even pornography, in dance. Instead, she initiates her series of works on sexuality (of which 7 Pleasures is one installment) by writing a letter to the American performance artist Carolee Schneemann asking permission to restage Schneemann’s 1964 performance Meat Joy. Schneemann politely declined, and the result of their epistolary exchange became the origin of Ingvartsen’s masterpiece, the solo 69 positions (2014), which New Yorkers had a chance to see last year at MoMA PS1. In that “guided tour” to experimental performance of the 1960s (and whose other major reference has a direct link to NYU, Richard Schechner’s iconic Dionysus in 69 (1969), parts of which Ingvartsen reenacts), Ingvartsen explicitly looks at how sexuality and sex operate as major forces of political resistance; how they drive perception, taste, language, behavior, politics, desire, and the attribution of value in our consumerist societies of pornographic control.
Now, with 7 Pleasures (2015), Ingvartsen pushes even further her research on the intricate relations between sex, pornography, power, pleasure, and political resistance initiated with 69 Positions. This powerful, visceral, and deeply poetic piece is a moving statement on the fleshed precarity and uncanny beauty of that which we still insist to call “the human body” specifically through out the opening twenty minutes of 7 Pleasures. Ingvartsen’s courageous experimental gesture is to address what dance, as an art form, but also society at large, have still so much trouble to tackle openly: the sexual drive of the human multitude, which, disturbingly, as 7 Pleasure’s long opening scene reminds us, may lead both to joyful collective assemblages of liberated enfleshment of pleasures, as well as to poisonous recurrence of fascism’s ultimate violations. It is a matter of deciding which dance, and which bodies, really matters. André Lepecki, Ph.D. is the Chairman of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. A scholar at the intersection of critical dance studies, curatorial practice, performance theory, contemporary dance and visual arts performance, his writings include “Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement” and “Singularities: Dance and Visual Arts in the Age of Performance.”
FUNDING The Flemish Authorities, Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Germany) & The Danish Arts Council. With the support of Musée de la Danse/ Centre Chorégraphique National de Rennes et de Bretagne. A House on Fire co-production; with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union Research and residency supported by APAP; with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.
WHAT’S NEXT ... JOHN ZORN: BAGATELLE MARATHON OCT 6 & 7 From March to May 2015 John Zorn wrote 300 new compositions collected in a book of music called The Bagatelles. Skirball is proud to present a two-day marathon concert of 20 different ensembles performing over 100 different compositions from Zorn’s expansive new book of music. Hot from performing in Paris earlier in the year, these groups are performing better than ever and include core members of Zorn’s inner circle as well as exciting young players from the worlds of rock, jazz and classical music. THE FREEDOM THEATRE: THE SIEGE OCT 12-22 Based in the Palestinian Jenin Refugee Camp, The Freedom Theatre of Jenin’s production The Siege is a passionate retelling of the story of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, during the height of the second intifada. Drawn from interviews with survivors, it is told from the point of view of some of the armed Palestinian fighters who found refuge in the church. Along with 200 civilians, they were given sanctuary by the church’s resident priests and nuns and spent 39 days there with dwindling food, water and medical supplies. While the world watched, the fighters grappled with survival, ideology, and the decision to continue to the end, or surrender. DJ SPOOKY: REBIRTH OF A NATION NOV 4 A reimagining of director D.W. Griffith’s infamously racist 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation is a controversial and culturally significant project that examines how exploitation and political corruption still haunt the world, but in radically different forms. The project was DJ Spooky’s first large-scale multimedia performance piece and has been performed around the world.
ADRIENNE TRUSCOTT: ASKING FOR IT - A ONE-LADY RAPE ABOUT COMEDY STARRING HER P*SSY AND LITTLE ELSE! NOV 10 Radical comedian, activist and performance artist, Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It … mixes humor, dance, video and p*ssy-puppetry, while undoing the rules and rhetoric surrounding rape. Truscott straddles the world of standup and performance art, dressed only from the waist up and ankles down. With commentary from George Carlin, Louis C. K. and Robert De Niro, Truscott takes on ducks, mini-skirts, rape whistles, Cosby and #45. Heavy at its core but light on its feet, Truscott makes jokes about rape all night long…even if you ask her to stop. JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND NOV 11 Mx Justin Vivian Bond presents a raucous and seductive evening of songs and stories. Declared a “cabaret messiah” by Time Out/London, Bond is a transgenre artist living in New York City. As a performer, both on and Off-Broadway, Mx Bond has received numerous accolades, winning an Obie (2001), a Bessie (2004), a Tony nomination (2007), the Ethyl Eichelberger Award (2007). V authored the Lambda Literary Award winning memoir TANGO: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels (The Feminist Press, 2011). THE HYPOCRITES: PIRATES OF PENZANCE NOV 29-DEC 10 Swimming pools, twinkly lights, a wellstocked Tiki Bar and beach balls welcome the audience to this raucous and utterly zany beach party adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. The entire audience joins the cast on the stage-beach, immersed in the action alongside sappy pirates, dewy-eyed damsels, bumbling bobbies and one very stuffy Major General. It is a spunky model of a (post)modern major musical. FOR TICKETS AND MORE INFO: nyuskirball.org