Movement Research Performance Journal, Issue #58/59

ISBN-13: 9798218402877 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023 / 72 str.

Joshua Lubin-Levy

Opis

Since its inception in 1990, the Movement Research Performance Journal has fostered the evolution of written and graphic languages that contemplate current issues of dance and performance. Created by and for artists, the journal provides a unique forum for critical, rigorous, and creative exploration of the politics of performance, and seeks to address a multi-disciplinary readership. The journal focuses on artistsâ of-the-moment concerns, with past issues exploring topics related to gender and sexuality, environments and eco-activism, critical approaches to race and ethnicity, technology and multimedia, Indigenous performance and settler colonial legacies, private property and neoliberal individualism, as well as tactics of liberation and revolt. Issue 58/59 of the Movement Research Performance Journal set out to explore the concept of âresearch,â a word intrinsic to our name and our parent organizationâs long history of supporting process over product. Research is such an academic concept (less so than our initial idea of doing an issue on pedagogy), and we wanted to find a way to thread our work around the relationship dance and performance practice has to systems of âhigherâ education. We looked to contributing editors embedded in the university system, those parasitically attached to it, and those intentionally operating outside of codified educational systems. We wanted to leave room for some contributors to celebrate how performance upends the conventional hierarchy between teaching and learningâand for others to lambast the way dance and performance has been curtailed to a university model. We wrote to prospective writers: Keyword: Research (n.) studious inquiry or examination, especially: investigation or experimentation aimed atthe discovery and interpretation of facts, revision of accepted theories or laws in the light ofnew facts, or practical application of such new or revised theories or laws. Prompt: Movement Research was founded in 1978 as a self-described âlaboratoryâ for investigating dance and movement. In its long history, the organization has prioritized giving space to artists for rehearsing, developing, and investigatingârather than presenting and producingâtheir work. The Movement Research Performance Journal can be seen as an outgrowth of this missionâextending the rehearsal studio into the space of the page. In its first issue, editor Richard Elovich describes the journal as âa new public space for the New York performance communityâ¦a slightly anarchic forum in which opposing ideas and aesthetics can be seriously developed and debated.â How do we understand this mission of staying in the zone of research today? How are artists (re)building pedagogy, and processes of learning, into their practice? What contemporary or historical alternative schools, and approaches to schooling, might be seen in constellation with the founding of Movement Research? How are students of dance and performance confronting the possibility and failure of an educational system predicated on both their enrichment and indebtedness?