by Contemporary Cruising |

On Maria Hassabi’s PREMIERE presented by The Kitchen and Performa, NYC , 2013

A dance of a million première

The ephemeral nature of dance is one of its great pleasures. Every moment is special,
never to be repeated the same way, no matter how many times a dance is performed. It’s
impossible to see everything; one way to grasp dance is not to grasp at it, to be willing to
let it run its course. When dance is slowed down so that its forms and images linger,
though, viewers can immerse themselves in the continuity of the movement; there is time to
become part of the dance, to inhabit it.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Adam Linder, Cult to the Built on What, 2013

For you I put this dress on / for you I put the stress on / act like you know me / act act like you know me…

Adam Linder raps in a husky voice under the rhythm of immersive electronic music. I am fascinated, mesmerized , entertained. For this somewhat cryptically titled rapography Cult to the Built on What, the Berlin-based Australian choreographer reskills as a rapper, becoming the star of the night; the audience follows his script of staged and pre-recorded rap, timidly responding ‘oo -ooh ooh’ to his ‘ee-eeh eeh’.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Mårten Spångberg, the bad boy of contemporary dance

The Dane likes his audience to leave their phones on and has a troupe that’s the choreographic equivalent of Occupy. He explains why he’s aiming for ‘something neo-liberalism can’t cope with You’ve seen contemporary dance, even if you don’t think you have: it’s actually been infiltrating the pop world for years. Some recent examples:Beyoncé filched great chunks of Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Ellen Söderhult on AGON by Florentina Holzinger

Impulstanz offered a fabulous world premiere by Florentina Holzinger et al, an excellent piece that develops unpredictably and makes up for an interesting take on contemporary dance 2014. It is AGON, in farfetched but genius interpretations, an urgent exhaustion of the theme of struggle for recovery and the empowering and healing potential of intense physicality. Throughout the performance radically different ways of addressing this are proposed as drastically different activities, expressions and modes of performing are superimposed and transposed in and out of each other.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Performance art goes legit
Experiential works are showing up at fairs more and more, and a small selection of institutions and niche collectors are snapping them up.
By Gareth Harris.

Performance art is no longer a fringe activity in the art world: the genre is gaining momentum at art fairs worldwide with more and more galleries showing works that would once have been considered unsellable in the marketplace. But this field is still very much a specialist, niche area with only a small selection of major museums and a handful of collectors prepared to invest both financially and intellectually in “live” works that must usually adhere to complex sets of instructions provided by the artists. Most collectors subsequently turn to tangible items: documentation of performance works in the form of films and photographs.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Christian Margol introducing Michael Clark

The incredible dancers of the Michael Clark Company from London present revolutionary contemporary dance in which the worlds of classical ballet, modern dance and explosive rock music meet and coexist in perfect harmony in their work “come, been and gone”.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer on Ryan Trecartin

There is nothing else in today’s art world even remotely like Ryan Trecartin’s videos. Copying and pasting a crazy collage of dialects and accents, the protagonists—so many young, sexually ambiguous, wig-wearing and face-painted chatterboxes—deliver compu-pop poetry about their chronic over-existence. It’s a sci-fi theater of the absurd for our manically paced YouTube era, a singular vision created by Trecartin in collaboration with his creative partner, Lizzie Fitch.

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