About the Master Class

This master class is free and open to any artist interested in movement. Space is limited, so please only register if you are planning to attend. Once all slots are filled, we will offer waitlist tickets, which do not guarantee a spot in the master class.

If you are a student of SAIC or Columbia College, please contact the dance department for registration.

Maybe To Spectacle

Trajal Harrell will conduct a seminar that is part lecture, part conversation and part moving together. Using video and photographs, Harrell will map the trajectory of his aesthetic history beginning with his work on voguing and early postmodern dance and moving on to his more recent work with butoh and modern dance. Short sections of some of the dances will be learned as theoretical examples. The class transforms freely between moving, seeing, and talking as interests and questions arise from being in the room together.

About the Artist

Trajal Harrell came to visibility with the Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church series of works which asked, “What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?” Over the past two decades, Harrell has created a body of work that interrogates the cracks and fissures of history, drawing from the early postmodern and Japanese butoh dance traditions, kabuki theater, voguing balls, and runway movement. He recently completed a residency at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, focusing on the surreal and radical style of Tatsumi Hijikata—the founder of butoh, a form of Japanese modern dance that was especially popular in late twentieth-century. Harrell has presented his work in numerous American and International venues and festivals, such as The Kitchen, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA); Performa Biennial; The New Museum, New York, the Barbican Centre Art Gallery, London, the Walker Art Center, Centre Pompidou Paris, and Panorama Festival Rio, Festival d’Avignon, Festival d’Automne in Paris, and Holland Festival.

About Between Gestures

Between October 24 and November 02, 2019, the Cultural Service of the Consulate of France in Chicago and the Goethe-Institut Chicago come together to celebrate and explore dance and performance in Europe, its context and its history, in partnership with multiple Chicago venues and organizations. Two European cultural institutions, the Centre national de la Danse in Pantin, France, as part of Caravane, a mobile CN D, and PACT Zollverein in Essen, Germany, will join to create a multifaceted program with performances, workshops, conversations, screenings and a party!

betweengestures.org