Above: Scholar Thomas DeFrantz reads amidst performers Brittany Engel-Adams, Stanley Gambucci, Jeremy Jae Neal, Nicholas Leichter and Netta Yerushalmy in Revelations: The Afterlives of Slavery, the third installment in Yerushalmy's Paramodernities. Paramodernities is part of the 2018 Bridge Project. Photo credit: Paula Lobo.
2018 Bridge Project
Paramodernities #1, #3 and #4
A Series of Dance Experiments Led by Artist Netta Yerushalmy
Netta Yerushalmy's West Coast Debut
February 22-25, 2018
ODC Theater
Hope Mohr Dance’s Bridge Project, in partnership with ODC Theater, presented a series of dance experiments led by NYC-based artist Netta Yerushalmy, Feb. 23-25, 2018. Paramodernities is a multidisciplinary project that engages deeply with the canon of modern dance in radical, reverent, and violent ways in order to spark new ideas, choreographies, and conversations. For this West Coast debut, Yerushalmy shared responses to Vaslav Nijinsky, Alvin Ailey, and Merce Cunningham followed by public discussions.
#1. VASLAV NIJINSKY. The installment that explores Vaslav Nijinky is called The Work of Dance in the Age of Sacred Lives and features scholar David Kishik and Yerushalmy herself.
#3. ALVIN AILEY. Revelations: the Afterlives of Slavery is the installment sprouting from the work of Alvin Ailey, and features scholar Thomas DeFrantz and performers Oluwadamilare Ayorinde, Brittany Engel-Adams, Stanley Gambucci, Nicholas Leichter, and Yerushalmy.
#4. MERCE CUNNINGHAM. Material from five different works by Merce Cunningham will be combined to form an “inter-body event” performed by Brittany Engel-Adams and Marc Crousillat who are joined on stage by a panel of local scholars and artists including Claudia La Rocco, Jennifer DeVre Brody, Maxe Crandall, Margaret Jenkins, and Jos Lavery.
PRESS
"Netta Yerushalmy made a stunning San Francisco debut...Paramodernities is to contemporary dance what fellow Guggenheim award winner Taylor Mac’s A 24- Decade History of Popular Music is to popular music. Both deconstruct laissez faire naïveté of cultural assumptions; both give attention to the queer voice, their contributions to society and their suppression throughout modern history. And both match sharp intelligence with fluid unconventional performance, demystifying the arts along the way and proving that perception, like gender, is multifaceted."
-- David E. Moreno, Paramodernities (West Coast Premiere), Culture Vulture, February 23, 2018 (reviewing the 2018 Bridge Project)
"What does it feel like to consider the legacy as a horizontal thing and not as the chronological historicized narrative that we know? The horizontal, Para, “side by sideness” is the magic and the meat of the project. How does the contemporary body experience that horizontality?"
-- Netta Yerushalmy, from "Rethinking Dance Landmarks: An Interview with Netta Yerushalmy about Paramodernities" ODC.dance.stories, February, 21 2018
A response to the program from James Fleming for SFMOMA Open Space’s Limited Edition series.
The first installment of a three-part conversation between Michelle LaVigne (USF) and Julian Carter (California College of the Arts) responding to the Paramodernities performance for LaVigne's blog, Dance Matters.
PUBLIC WORKSHOP: Deconstructing Dance History: A Studio Practice
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 25, 2018 12-5 PM
Description of workshop by Netta Yerushalmy:
This workshop is about meeting ourselves a new, through re-embodying what I refer to as the "geological" layers that comprise our trained moving bodies.In the first half of the workshop we'll spend time studying and dancing movements that we in some sense know, that we take for granted, or that we deem "old school" and naive. Like trying on a period-costume and allowing it to change our behavior, we'll reverently (if temporarily) commit ourselves to the physicality, meaning, and ideologies that these movements hold. The second half of the workshop will be about manipulating that information with a variety of irreverent methods. These deconstructive methods aim at generating new perspectives for workshop-participants about our individual and shared past-present-future moving bodies.
ABOUT NETTA YERUSHALMY
Based in New York City since 2000, Netta was most recently named a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants-For-Artists recipient. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Jerome Robbins BogliascoFoundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Extended Life (LMCC), as well as an Artist In Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob’s Pillow, Watermill Center, Movement Research, DiP resident (Gibney), Djerassi, ICI Berlin, and TribecaPerforming Arts Center. Her work was presented by American Dance Festival, Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, La Mama, Danspace Project, HarknessDance Festival, + many others; In Israel by Curtain-Up, Jerusalem International Dance Week, International-Exposure; In Europe by HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Centre National de la Danse (Paris), Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Berlin), and International Solo-Dance-Theater Festival (Stuttgart). Commissions for repertory companies: Ririe Woodbury (SLC, '15), Zenon (Minneapolis, '12,'14), Same Planet Different World (Chicago, '13), Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts ('11). Netta has worked with students at the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, Alvin Ailey, Tisch School of the Arts, University of Austin, University of Utah, James Madison University, Kelim Choreographic Center (Israel), University of the Arts (Philadelphia). Netta danced with Doug Varone and Dancers ’07-'12. She also performed with Nancy Bannon, Mark Jarecki, Metropolitan Opera Ballet. She currently dances with Joanna Kotze, and Pam Tanowitz.
VIDEO
Post Show Discussion
Paramodernities is a National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network (NPN/VAN) Creation & Development Fund Project commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow Dance in partnership with HMD's Bridge Project, New York Live Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and developed in part during residencies at Trinity College, Williams College, Djerassi Art Program, Watermill Center, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Harkness Dance Center 92Y, and
Movement Research.
HMD's 2018 Bridge Project was presented in association with ODC Theater with promotional support from SFMOMA's Open Space Limited Edition. Limited Edition is an Open Space partnership with CounterPulse, The Lab, ODC Theater, Performance at SFMOMA, and Z Space, exploring questions of legacy and lineage through performances, discussions, commissioned texts and gatherings at various locations throughout San Francisco.