Catherine Damman

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  print Summer 2021

  Lust, Caution

  WORDS DRAPE THEMSELVES on art like a charismatic hostess on her divan, each sentence extruded through a lifetime’s discipline in the pretty postures of solicitation. This kind of writing—licit, sanctioned, a vehicle for the conferral of value—is the critic’s dominant mode, but the work of Tiffany Sia demands something else. How to deform language, to refuse the services into which it is regularly conscripted? The title of Sia’s first institutional exhibition, “Slippery When Wet,” which ran at New York’s Artists Space from February 17 to May 1, borrows from rather lowly prose, those meager

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  print March 2021

  Risk Everything

  A BALL TEMPTS two running children, their mouths joyful, their eyes on the prize. Clothes and baguettes spill onto the grass; neither modesty nor scarcity is of great concern. Suffused with delectation and too good to be true, the scene is Edenic, a black-and-white fête galante for the end of the twentieth century. Above it all float a nude couple unencumbered by gravity and ensnared in each other. His pale hips sink between her thighs, his torso presses limply on her chest. Her countenance is bolted in an ambiguous expression.

  On the right, we are in the same place: the same lush trees, the same

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  interviews July 14, 2020

  Saidiya Hartman

  Five centuries of white supremacist terror: not just a past to which we are ineluctably fastened, but a present which produces us, albeit in differing orders of magnitude and vulnerability. The United States has long maintained the fiction that this country had molted its foundational violence, and yet, just as your skin sheds daily only to live dispersed atop your furniture and knick-knacks, so too does the grime of history make up the loam in which a person is destined to flourish, struggle, or wither. The work of Saidiya Hartman has charted a path in and through the social arrangements produced

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  print January 2020

  DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION

  JUXTAPOSITIONS, groupings, sight lines: Foundational to the curatorial enterprise, these considerations also subtend Wu Tsang’s two-channel video We hold where study, 2017. A honeyed baritone voice-over from poet and theorist Fred Moten introduces scenes of his sons, Julian and Lorenzo, carefree and joyous in a verdant landscape. Thereafter the work unfolds in a series of sensuous duets––between boychild and Josh Johnson, and Ligia Lewis and Jonathan Gonzalez—that speak to and suffuse one another. Projected side by side so that their frames overlap, the videos present choreographed experiments

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  performance September 18, 2019

  Dancing in the Dark

  “GOD TOOK NO PLEASURE IN HER.” A nod or some form of unbidden recognition ran through me. She was made to die, or allowed to die; in either case, she refused her fate, punching through wet earth from grave toward unaccommodating sky. Obstinate, the hand could be mastered only by the one who had borne it; the mother was swift and unhesitating with the rod—and so the buried girl stopped moving for good. 

  This story, The Willful Child, by the Brothers Grimm, haunts Ligia Lewis’s Water Will (in Melody), 2018. Water Will is the third in a trilogy of stage works, each of which wrestles with one color

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  performance May 2019

  THESE WOMEN’S WORK

  THE SNEAKERS, six pairs in all, are pink. Every actress who appears in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole (2019) wears them—with jeans, with scrubs, beneath petticoats. The anesthetized set, by Mariana Sanchez, is spare: A hospital bed, a reception desk, and a waiting area adorned with potted plants are surrounded on three sides by tiles that match, almost exactly, the color of the actresses’ shoes. Flattering, photogenic, and distinctively of this moment, the rosy shade nonetheless seems almost threatening, mutant, evoking the soigné efforts of corporate branding run amok.

  Mournful bagpipes

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  performance April 2019

  ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

  OPERA, CHARLES ROSEN ONCE WROTE, is governed by “the expectation of essential lunacy.” Its unrepentant feeling, its curling decor, its warbling inheritances, all these gilded artifacts of empire seem so far from the word’s Latin root, opus, which translates to “work,” that favorite American religion.

  The late operas of Michigan-born composer Robert Ashley (1930–2014) are staged with a dignified efficiency that seems at once to point backward to this etymology and to push the genre forward into the twentieth century. To begin a new presentation of Ashley’s 1985 Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) this

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  performance January 08, 2019

  Those Women Who Destroy the Infinite

  TWO PUDDLES, HYPNOTIC AND IRIDESCENT; ALL SURFACE, NO DEPTH. I watch a scrum of dancers make them, hunched and sobbing, emptying themselves. A knee drags through the wet. Afterward, as coats are slung across shoulders, the tears slowly return to air.

  Elements of the theater’s infrastructure, seemingly evaporated too, had been strategically removed: light rigs withdrawn, pipes displaced, the risers diarticulated and strewn about in clumps. The effect is the renovation of mood. Starkly cavernous, the changed architecture left both audience and performer to rattle around inside of it.

  Moriah Evans’s

• previews January 2019

  “MOVED BY THE MOTION: SUDDEN RISE”

  Organized by Adrienne Edwards with Greta Hartenstein

  I can see him smiling, swirling, velveteen. In Wu Tsang’s 2015 video Girl Talk, Fred Moten is verdant, shot through with sunshine. At the Whitney this spring, as the collective Moved by the Motion, Moten and Tsang—along with boychild, Patrick Belaga, Josh Johnson, and Asma Maroof—will present “Sudden Rise,” a series of performances encompassing fragments of music, text, dance, and film. Is an ensemble always already a collage? Language and references drawn from Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Jimi Hendrix, and Hannah

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  print November 2018

  CLOSE UP: KINETIC ELEGY

  ON NOVEMBER 21, 1986, Them, a performance by Chris Cochrane, Dennis Cooper, and Ishmael Houston-Jones, had an infamous premiere at Performance Space 122; it nearly got the place shut down. Eight years ago, PS 122 revived the work, and this summer it returned to Ninth Street and First Avenue as part of the East Village Series inaugurating the newly renovated, and renamed, Performance Space New York. The work’s legend—in certain corners, though, I would argue, not enough—precedes it.

  So I knew Them would break my heart, but I wasn’t ready for it, not really. Premonition makes for a shitty

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  music October 10, 2018

  Half-Life of the Blues

  WHEN A FRIEND FIRST INTRODUCED ME to the music of Loren Connors, I refused to listen to it on the grounds that it was too beautiful. In his signature electric improvisations, Connors makes use of layered swells and serrated feedback; just as arresting is his permissive handling of negative space and scattered fuzz. Connors’s playing often luxuriates in extended caesura, punctuated by thin squeals and deliberately skeletal leads. Unanchored notes seem set aloft, only to drift and kink mid-air or be cut short by little catches of breath. Always plangent and often surreal, the more recent sounds

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  print September 2018

  Presence at the Creation

  THE GRAMMAR OF IT ALL is nearly impossible to parse, slippery in the mind and unwieldy in the mouth. Questions—though not always the right ones—abound. The first: What was Judson Dance Theater? Those inclined to diffidence might say it was some dancing that took place in a church, Judson Memorial, located in the Village. For others, what went on in that inner sanctum was no less than the most significant convulsion in the history of twentieth-century dance: not just movement, then, but revolution. July 6, 1962 was the first Judson performance, straightforwardly advertised as “A Concert