"A riot is the language of the unheard" at Cooper Union (Video)

Homage to Etel Adnan (Anthology)

at SPD

Does the Document Promise? (@ Academy of American Poets)

I would like the tense of the promise to be the tense of the poem I am dedicating to you, just as soon as I've written it

“Talking about my generation” (@ The New Museum)

“Talking about my generation”: Jill Johnston and the Critic as Subject

Movement Research in Residence

Cover Image: 

Elaine Summers, Ouverture, 2012. Photo: Sarah Holcman

Part of RE:NEW RE:PLAY, in Discussions

Presented in conjunction with Rethinking the Imprint of Judson Dance Theater Fifty Years Later: Movement Research in Residence.

Critical Correspondence is an online publication by Movement Research. For this program, Critical Correspondence coeditors Aaron Mattocks and Marissa Perel honor the celebrated writer and critic Jill Johnston, whose experimental and personal voice communicated the culture of the interdisciplinary 1960s art scene. In light of Johnston’s innovative contributions to the form, this conversation considers contemporary criticism and the writer as subject. Speakers include David Velasco (editor of artforum.com) and Claudia La Rocco (founder of theperformanceclub.org). The event culminates as Movement Research artists perform readings of reviews on dance and performance.

Readers:
Thom Donovan
Ariel Goldberg
Cassie Petersen
Christine Shan Shan Hou

You Make Me Want to Shout

Carry the discourse

This is already a dance

The camera sweeps us up

Into time and we kiss

Here’s another kiss

Room swimming with visions

Of you and you and you

I just want to see all my friends at once

The camera swoons you are the glue

That touches everyone all at once

Essence of the social

You are the boundary of the true

Forms that separate work from life

I can’t hear these lyrics

Because you mean them to be mistakable

Is this what’s new?

New like a public dreaming

In a pop song is mistakable

Like some other form of public listening

You put your hand there

This place was replaceable

Because we were not

Utopia cannot be repeated

And other forms of joy

Suddenly free in this totally posed

Situation is that what you mean?

You make me want to shout

Utopia is what happens

When our friends are here

And no one’s looking

How to capture this on camera

When the club is real

When how we dance is news to me

You make me sing

I am at the end of all

Evening circulating

An evental thing to share

Like everyone was innocent

Vulnerable to the true

It’s all so simple

A sudden charisma overtakes you

Be my dawn

I don’t know joy

But that we are alive

When we do the same thing

Without repetition

In this dance you make me sweat

You make me want to shout

This is where dreams end and the social begins

In this dance shared like all dance ever was

Utopian like that scene

In Charles Atlas’ Hail the New Puritan

When Michael Clark sails down into the club

And flirts with the first person he sees

Then slaps someone else’s ass

Then dances with another

Then reclines into someone else’s arms

Takes a puff from their cigarette

Then dances with yet another

Then takes something else offered him

Snorts it then rises to the bar to buy someone a drink

Then hands them their drink

Then dances with someone on the dance floor

Then joins the DJ and performers on stage

Then climbs down and dances again with a small group

I am at the end of evening

The beginning of

A dance with you

Begins with us

So we wear this banner being alive

So the camera comes out

Where we can see it plainly

Where we can see it in this moment

When we see ourselves being social

This is the unaffected interview

With all the people we ever knew

Answer these questions like the tape’s

Not even on

Still answer me like the tape’s

Not on

I move and we are not this movement

Against a wave of passion of night

Sing we are the beginning of something

And this is the kind of socialism

That your work always reminds me

Is the most alluring

To touch this togetherness

Always fleeing from us

Like that scene where Michael Clark

Sails down from the unseen entrance

Of a club…  all it takes is one person sublimely

To pass through the hands of all those others

Then they are like money

Then dance is like actual money

Social equivalence I have dreamt of

Body paint and food

PBS is my medium

Dictating to me the dying gasp

Of an aborted North American socialism

Mitt Romney I hope I never have to say your name

In a poem again to dance against empire

To value differently this gestus

Not just work or leisure.