Made in USA | Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)

What could post-modern dance have in common with voguing, the flashy dance hybrid which exploded out of Harlem in the late 60s, apart from the fact that both emerged in a period of social and artistic experimentation in the course of which the body regained its political connotations? In “Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (M2M)” -a variation for three dancers on “Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning”, an in situ work which adapts to the different spaces in which it is performed- Trajal Harrell presents us with history that’s made-to-measure. The young, convention-flouting choreographer from New York sets out to arrange this encounter between voguing and post-modern dance, less to reproduce the feel of late 60s counter-culture than to put the body back center stage as a core around which the Self can form and as a focal point for demanding the right to be different.

However, Harrell isn’t satisfied with simply (re)constructing a fictional history -he wants to engage the contemporary viewer by placing them on the cusp between these two worlds and offering them a History interpreted through the prism of the body. This conversion in space and time from ‘then’ to ‘now’ does more than restate the issues surrounding the performance of history and the social processes that shape the body; it also proposes -through the marrying of heterogeneous dance styles- a queer way of seeing which has the power to reveal sources of meaning in the ruptures created by contradictions: how does the body ‘read’ historical events?

Premiere: 11-13 October 2012 - Danspace Project, New York