Christopher Gregory/The New York Times
The choreographer Sarah Michelson, center foreground, among guards at the Museum of Modern Art. She says she may use some of them in her piece for the coming series there, Some sweet day.
HAD you stood in the middle of the Museum of Modern Art?s atrium this summer and cast your eyes up, you might have seen a small mirrored square peeking from the base of a glass guardrail amid the scrupulously pristine architecture.
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?We?ve joined the Ellsworth Kelly exhibit,? the choreographer Dean Moss said, laughing, his voice sounding strange in the empty museum as he described how the Mylar prop had gotten wedged there during a rehearsal. It now seemed like the perfect punch line for a joke about the performing arts infiltrating the visual arts citadel: How did the choreographer sneak into the collection? ?A small mark of our passing,? Mr. Moss wrote recently in an e-mail. ?I haven?t checked lately, but perhaps it?s still there.?
The square can?t hold on forever. But dance just might. In recent years the form has become a high-profile fixture in museums, galleries and international exhibitions. What at first seemed like a run-of-the-mill trend has developed into a thoughtful integration. In New York, visual arts curators are increasingly scouting contemporary theaters; museums are examining how to collect ephemeral work and strengthen their performance departments. (The Whitney Museum of American Art just named Jay Sanders, who organized the performance-heavy biennial with Elisabeth Sussman, as its first curator of performing art and is creating its new building with an eye toward live art.) And performance series are being incorporated into historical surveys.
Next month Mr. Moss will be one of six choreographers commissioned by MoMA to present work in the atrium for what promises to be a marquee ? and well-named ? series: Some sweet day. J?r?me Bel, Deborah Hay, Faustin Linyekula, Sarah Michelson and Steve Paxton are the other illustrious artists chosen by the guest curator, the choreographer Ralph Lemon, who has, perhaps more than any other contemporary figure, managed a career that moves fluidly between genres and disciplines. (He performed in the atrium last year, during ?On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.?) Museum staffers have been pleased with recent performance experiments in the atrium, a challenging space; and should this series succeed, it will likely be followed by more.
?There?s been great performance work at MoMA, but it?s been on the side,? said Jenny Schlenzka, an associate curator at MoMA PS1. ?We don?t want to go back to the ?60s, when dance was an alternative to the institution.?
The visual art world?s current explorations in dance ?all speak to a certain acknowledgment that is unreliable but also real,? Mr. Lemon said. ?We?re now being given a different sort of real estate. This is not dance being placed in some back gallery as a tangential event. MoMA is giving me the atrium space with a very reasonable budget.? (MoMA declined to release Mr. Lemon?s budget.)
Dance and art have a rich history of mutual influence, of course, including the unruly experimentation within the Dada movement, the influential nexus of interdisciplinary collaborations galvanized by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and, 50 years ago in New York, the radical developments in the performing and visual arts around the Judson Dance Theater.
While parallels are inevitably drawn between now and the Judson era, a time when hybrid and interdisciplinary investigations also abounded and political unrest was in the air, these broad-stroke comparisons gloss over essential differences. The art and dance worlds are much bigger and more commercial now, and more institutionalized. There is less space than there was 50 years ago, when Trisha Brown sent a harnessed dancer down the side of a SoHo building. These days her dancers are ensconced inside the museum.
?This is a moment when we?ve kind of tried to blow open the definitions of what and who belong in these places of culture,? said MoMA?s associate director, Kathy Halbreich. She is one of several galvanizing figures to have come from Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, a forward-thinking outlier that has long integrated live art into its vision. ?Which is interesting, because politically I think things are closing down,? she added, referring to the ?recalcitrant positions? that now curdle much debate in American society.
?Performing arts raise such profound questions about what we in the visual arts are doing,? said Adam Weinberg, the Whitney?s director. ?So what are the boundaries, if any? What is the role for museums in general, and what is the role for the Whitney particularly? It?s thrilling.?
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Tags: arts, Dance, Meets, series, some, sweet, Visual
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