MADELINE HOLLANDER Madeline Hollander is a choreographer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. These are various drawings for some recent works including New Max (2018), Arena (2017), and Competition (2017).
SARAH FRIEDLAND Two weeks away from shooting a project I have been planning for over a year, I keep pouring over these maps and annotations, trying to summon a sense of what our dance will actually be like in Piazza Renzo Imbeni, our shooting location in Bologna. I am making CROWDS, a dancefilm installation investigating the politicized choreography of crowd typologies and the slippages between them. Dance has always had, and continues to have, a fraught relationship with notation. Yet my notes come from perhaps a less uneasy relationship--between storyboards/shotlists and their anticipation of what is actually shot on set. What fascinates me about these notations is their promise of obsolescence. The annotations of the dance I made in preparation for rehearsal have already been made obsolete by the unfaithfulness of the dancers’ bodies to adhere to these marks: the process of choreographing in a room with collaborating dancers immediately overwhelms the notes preceding it. So too does the process of actually shooting, wipe away and draw over a shotlist or storyboard. And yet, these notations capture so well this moment of preparation that is caught somewhere in between the generative work of imagination and the anxiety of hypothetical thinking.
EVA DEAN I’m deep in the process of researching, creating and honing Part II, Labyrinth of my LIQUID SILVER trilogy. I am the daughter of an architect and my relationship to seeing and moving through space is deeply embedded. The seed for creating Labyrinth was actually in 1987, when I created Untidy Packages. I was and still am inspired by Egyptian art and energy concepts that spring out of my psyche. Perhaps I was Egyptian in a past life? In Untidy Packages, I created my first catacomb on stage. Fast forward to Labyrinth that I began creating in 2015. In my first Labyrinth foray, I created a short ode to what it was like in the mid 80s to earn a living, choreograph, take classes and learn how to navigate NYC. This ode reflects the maze-like fast paced motion through NYC’s gridded streets and subterranean public transportation. I enjoyed the feel of my muscles as I moved throughout the city. I was stimulated and exhausted by the end of the day. “5-D” was my next Labyrinth journey, and I tapped into my fascination with movement through the multidimensionality of space. Next up Catacomb, that utilized my basement studio’s subterranean energy followed by my most recent Combat. In creating Combat, I thought that my spatial movement pattern was a labyrinth, but discovered that what I was really making is a maze. My Combat maze is a complex warren of passageways, sharp turns, and hard walls. In moving through this maze, there are many choices, with multiple entrances and exits that are anxiety provoking. Combat’s maze does not have the calming effect of moving through a labyrinth. In Combat a homosapien is catapulted to the edge of a precipice as she struggles to move within an embattled democracy and ecosystem.
to see more: www.madelinehollander.com www.sarahfriedland.com www.evadeandance.com to contact Weird Babes: caroline.partamian@gmail.com www.carolinepartamian.com Caroline Partamian is a curator, visual artist, and musician living and working in Brooklyn, NY.