Rock and “Roll Call”

The Movement Research Spring Festival is back with "Roll Call"—a theme that hints at ideas of attendance, visibility and action. The festival, which officially opens April 23, also pays tribute to the organization's 30th anniversary with daring programming that spans 21 venues. (And in keeping with the fact that everyone's broke, almost every event is free.) This year's curatorial committee—Megan Byrne, Michael Mahalchick, Will Rawls and Regina Rocke—recently met in Williamsburg to discuss their vision. They've done the hard part. All you have to do is show up.

Megan Byrne: For our initial meeting, we all threw out ideas and it was impressive how aligned we were with wanting to focus on gallery spaces, the economy, collaboration. We knew that if we dawdled on topics we would lose time.

Will Rawls: If we wanted, we could have had a series of performances in living rooms in Queens.

Byrne: As opposed to last year's festival, we chose not to use Judson Memorial Church as a hub.

Rawls: It was definitely this idea that if we're in an intense recession and people are going to be dropping off the radar, we needed to find a way to extend the latticeworks of infrastructure and creativity. It was important to initiate collaborations between venues and curators, and to highlight different parts of the city to keep things visible.

Michael Mahalchick: We're using a lot of different venues to reach people who maybe miss things if they're not engaged in the slightly insulated dance world.

Regina Rocke: I came in thinking that to go to the same spot for every event would have driven me crazy. And we're also reaching different people who probably don't know anything about Movement Research.

Rawls: Our opening-night event, "Roll Call!," is at the New Museum. We're focusing on the young and the old and there will be new works by [founding artist] Mary Overlie and Faye Driscoll. Mary was really excited. She said, on the phone, "I feel like you're bringing someone back from the dead."

Rocke: We're having one workshop: "Democratic Dance Session" I realized a bunch of workshops and classes weren't really what our festival was about. We thought that we would have one class that's sort of unique. So Milka Djordjevich is teaching democratic dance.

Rawls: Milka is interested in this idea of communal, democratic, continuous movement. If we wanted to be fanatically in-line with everything else the festival is based on, which is the way a bad economy can bring people together, we talked a little about the idea of Body Weather, which is a very democratic form. Anyone can do it.

Rocke: And I know I expressed this: I said, "If we're going to have a class, I want it to be a class where you move your body and work up a sweat. I suppose African movement can be taught that way where it does not stop; this is along the same line. I have issues with the hour-and-a-half class. I feel like you can't do anything.

Mahalchick: Hopefully we'll get people who don't normally do classes and workshops. I'm not much of a class-and-workshop kind of guy and I'm definitely going to go. I don't feel quite so intimidated by the nature of that class.

Byrne: Another event, "Archeography IV," is a collaboration between Live Architecture Network and Biba Bell. They're working with the idea of vectors—how to intersect space. They're using this really interesting elastic that's going to slice through the space like a wave.

Rawls: We have a gallery crawl, too. "Recessional" starts at the New Museum and travels through the Lower East Side, ending at Abrons Arts Center. It's a dynamic movement of bodies. And there will be a live performance in each gallery.

Mahalchick: At Abrons, it expands to live feeds from different parts of the world: Switzerland, Sweden, Lebanon, Brazil and France. Artists in all those places will do a short piece that will chain up to the next country, finally ending with an open performance score at Abrons that will be online for them to watch too.

Byrne: We asked the artists to do anything and everything that they think is dance right now.

Rawls: People could be broadcasting from their bathrooms.

Byrne: Some of these people are going to be dancing at 4am, their time.

Rawls: There's a certain amount of risk involved, but if you don't take a risk, you don't find new things. And with this gallery crawl, hopefully we're enlivening the city and engendering this kind of moving community. Once they come into the space, they realize how much more performance is going on in the world period.

Byrne: We also asked [performance collective] AUNTS to do something new. I think AUNTS is a phenomenal facilitator to artists. They say yes in ways that most producers just don't. It's fun to watch their wheels turn. What they pitched to us was right in line with everything we were dealing with: It's the idea of a fake economy. So "Factory," on April 18, leads to "Market" on May 1. It's an open participation event; anyone can come and go to this loft in Bushwick and make something—there will be silk-screening and video stations, and all of that work is going to be put into the Grace Exhibition Gallery where there's going to be a performative economy. All of the work has to be sold, and the viewers coming in have to create some sort of currency. It's almost bartering; you have to participate in the creation in order to buy. It's loosely inspired by Andy Warhol's Factory, but it's also a response to the economic crisis and ideas of new economy. When artists say, "We want to participate in the festival. How can we?" it's so much fun to say, "Make something new at this place and then sell it here." A lot of the stuff that we're doing is not like, "Oh, you made this dance; we'll show it at a theater." There's very little prepackaged stuff.

Rawls: And what's interesting is that the prepackaged stuff that is going to show up is going to be at Judson, which I think is an intentional choice.

Rocke: We're not about producing a piece and charging money to see it. Like the rest of the festival, it was my personal issue not have that prepackaged idea of "this is a performance festival."

Byrne: For "I Heart Judson" [to be performed at Judson Memorial Church], the artists are dealing with the idea of celebrity, self-celebrity, self-promotion and identity—all of those are current issues in the dance world. You have to promote yourself as an artist, and you have to create a Web identity and this whole chatter of self-celebrity.

Rawls: And the people that we chose really don't have an educated understanding about what Judson is, so I think what they're going to show is going to call into question Judson's identity in terms of a venue for historic experiments in performance. We could have things that are very cut and dry and were made two years ago. Who knows what they're going to bring? And I think that also calls into question how we continue to experiment with history that's being laid down.

Byrne: Judson is one of the few open spaces with a wood floor and lots of space, so I think maybe that is one of the reasons why people feel so compelled to show finished work there; it is one of the few opportunities we have where you can see it. That's the challenge of Judson: to keep it experimental, to keep it so that you can break rules, that work doesn't have to be finished, that you can fail. I think it's hard when it is one of the few venues where you can actually see the work with a little bit of distance.

Rocke: Movement Research is trying to go back to what its original mission was—more and more they're tired of people showing finished pieces that they'll be showing at the Kitchen a month later. I saw someone show her M.F.A. thesis there. I thought, If we get to curate it, this is our chance to show things that maybe are a little more experimental. We're also doing a panel discussion, "Private Dancer." Tommy DeFrantz is going to moderate it. The panelists are Chris Elam, Jmy Leary and Randy Martin [the chair of the Department of Art and Public Policy at NYU's Tisch School].

Mahalchik: We're hoping for a very exciting panel.

Rawls: Each person is working with the idea of policy on performance and presentation and economics in the same way.

Rocke: I was at P.A.R.T.S. [in Brussels] for three weeks, and they were asking, "Are you going to stay in Europe longer?" And I said, "No, I have to get back to my job," and they couldn't believe that I had a job. That blew their minds. They asked, "What companies do you dance for?" And I said, "Well, no one dances in a company anymore." It got me to thinking—by the time Mark Morris was our age, he could pay his dancers, and all they did was dance for him. I don't know anyone who is going on auditions like that; basically, none of us have money, so if you are going to dance for someone and be in a show, it's because you want to be. For this panel, I just felt we needed some different people. I didn't want to have a discussion with people who dance for and with each other.

Rawl: And in terms of the idea of creative economics and creative self-promotion and producing, the panel discussion is ideologically the center of the festival.

Mahalchick: We asked Chris Elam because the reaction in the room was like, Oh, wow. This could be really interesting.

Rawls: Hell yeah. The other thing is that it's at the 14th Street Y—it's in a black box, rough-around-the-edges theater in a community center. It's not a sterile conference room. I think we're trying to embed that intellectual rigor in a place that is based on community distribution of ideas. "WPA" is another cool event. International Dance Day falls on April 29. We got this e-mail from UNESCO's Conseil International de la Danse, which says, "Dance Day 2009 is dedicated to inclusive dance." So it's perfect. The idea was to take Fred Torres, an art gallery in Chelsea, which in some ways could be considered one of the most specific and curated places for not only art but also clientele. It's exclusive. And have an artist, Walter Dundervill, respond to this message in whatever way he wants to address ideas of inclusion and exclusion. Not by playing patty-cake with everyone, but something strong. [Laughs]

Byrne: We struggled with that one for a long time. The UNESCO statement is not something to take lightly. Or we felt responsibility around it.

Mahalchick: We have a lot of events in art galleries. I've always been a big cheerleader of the dance world within the art world and there's a lot of crossover that doesn't get discussed. A lot of choreographers are engaging in questions that artists are engaging in now that performance is suddenly becoming such an option since the whole Performa thing. That [biennial] really makes me bananas. I bitch about it constantly to everyone because I feel like, Why is Performa not engaging this vibrant group of people who are dealing with issues that are of concern to the art world? Why does that boundary have to be put in between things? It doesn't need to happen that way. The thing that really makes me crazy about that is that it takes visual artists who have no engagement or investment in performance and throws a bunch of money at them and says, "Make a performance, and now you're a performance artist." What if you took some of that money and threw it at people who were actually engaged in these issues of performance? How it functions, it's kind of gross. And in choosing these galleries, I'm like, "Okay guys, as much as Performa tells you that there is no connection, that is absolutely not true!" I am hoping to create a bridge between the two worlds.

Byrne: I also think we had the privilege of walking into a very established platform. It wasn't like two years ago when they had one month to save the festival. We walked into a different animal, and if anything we have continued the momentum from last year's festival. I had a good time last year.

Rocke: I was feeding off of that, definitely. There's no set agenda. It's not a festival where the same people produce and curate it every year so you just kind of go off of what was done last year and it becomes a machine where you already know the ropes. Which was frustrating, because we're doing this from zero, but that's what's great about it also: we have complete free rein. There were some set things we had to adhere to, but I would have said no if there had been a lot of restrictions and guidelines.

Byrne: One thing that was in response to last year is that we changed the date. It's not in June; it's much earlier. It's not when everyone leaves New York. And it needed to be shorter. We wanted to make most of the events free; that another reason for shortening it.

Rawls: If you ask one venue to host ten events, they're going to ask for something in return. If you ask 16 venues to host one event, it's manageable.

Byrne: And for our closing party—The Double Booty Standard—we're working with Secret Project Robot, an events space that focuses in on the art party or the lines between performance and party. It's perfect.

Rocke: I definitely learned not to be like, "They're going to say no, so I won't ask." So many people said yes. You just have to ask.

Movement Research Spring Festival 2009: "Roll Call" runs Apr 23–May 2. Visit movementresearch.org/rollcall for more information.

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