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in conversation_Jeanette Bisschops, David Velasco x Nile Harris
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in conversation_Jeanette Bisschops, David Velasco x Nile Harris

On Sarah Michelson: a dynamic conversation on choreography, publishing, and performance

29SEPT2024 Jeanette Bisschops in conversation with writer and director David Velasco & performer and director Nile Harris, discussing the Sarah Michelson monograph from MoMa's Modern Dance series.

Before being editor in chief of Artforum from 2017 to 2023, David Velasco was the creator of and series editor for "Modern Dance," a series of monographs published by the Museum of Modern Art, exploring dance makers in the twenty-first century, which has produced three books: Sarah Michelson (ed. David Velasco), Ralph Lemon (ed. Thomas T. Jean Lax), and Boris Charmatz (ed. Ana Janevski).


Selected quote by 99 Canal’s team:

“I remember this trip in Switzerland. It's a very potent memory of being in Switzerland for Art Basel, for my job. And I hated Art Basel—it was just market, pure market. Sarah was premiering Dover Beach at The Kitchen, and I used frequent flyer miles to fly back to catch the premiere. Then I was in New York for 18 hours, and I flew back to Basel to do the rest of the fair. But I cant miss this performance. This is actually what matters. It’s not tied to the market; it’s just done for the love.

I mean, this is the messed-up and also beautiful thing about dance, poetry, and a lot of forms that have no market—if you’re in it, you’re really not in it to make any money. So that keeps it clean in this way that’s also brutal. In contrast to what I was doing with the art market at the time, I felt like I had to be here. This is what matters. And there was something to that, I think, that connected to what it was about, that was so different from the world I was in, that I was being paid to do.”

David Velasco

Jeanette Bisschops Well, hi everyone! I'm Jeanette Bisschops. I'm an independent curator, and I've been working on a project called Performance Talks, and in addition, I've been hosting book clubs because I wanted to, as an independent curator and not having a space to work from, bring people together from the dance world and the visual art world and whoever is interested in performance and dance to just, like, gather and talk about performance. So I've been interviewing people like artists, dancers, choreographers, writers, curators, estate directors, mainly about the afterlives of performance. Coming from an institutional background, I felt like the visual art world still doesn't really have a lot of discourse around how to talk about performance, how to integrate it in institutions or not, and just kind of the many ways that performance can live on, how to historicize performance, etc.

I spoke to David about his modern dance series publication. A series of monographs on contemporary choreographers that was published by MoMA. And this book, one of the three ( the other two are on Ralph Lemon and Boris Charmatz) really stood out to me, and I had such a lovely conversation with David about this, and I wanted to open up this conversation with other people... So please also chime in, It's not just us talking. additionally, Nile and I know each other not even that long, but we had a really lovely studio visit, and we were kind of geeking out about the book.

The interesting thing is, both of us have not seen Sarah's work live before. I was introduced to it by David, and I was allowed to see some footage in an archive somewhere, and Nile..

Nile Harris Sadly unseen, no archival footage, just essays and vibes is all I know.

Jeanette Bisschops And David, obviously is very well known with her work.

So….David. I first want to have you introduce yourself a bit. Because I know you mostly from your former role as editor in chief at Art Forum. And I was only recently introduced to your writing. And I was kind of creepy in looking at your Instagram, and was like ‘who is David?’ I started scrolling back, and I saw some photos of you dancing as a boy, and I was like, Okay, it's like he's a dancer himself! I was just very curious why he was so drawn to dance as a writer. And I saw this interview with you about your early days as a dancer in New York, and we spoke a bit about it.

I think it would be nice as an introduction, if you can talk a bit about, like, what made you so interested in in writing about dance, and kind of how you started writing about dance, maybe also in your early days at Art Forum, where you were, like, kind of covering events first, and kind of moved from there?

David Velasco Yeah… I mean, there's a lot there. I moved to New York in 2002 and I had no idea what I was doing, but I went out every night when I was here. I went out to clubs, it was just the thing that I did. And I loved to dance. I couldn't speak to exactly why that is, but yeah, it's always been very much a part of what I've done socially. And I had a friend, have a friend, Kim Brandt, who's a choreographer, who also was here at that time, and she saw me, while I was dancing at clubs, and was like, I want to put you in my dances. So she was making dances at the time. The funny thing is, I'm, like, a very good club dancer, but it doesn't translate to a stage at all.

Jeanette Bisschops What kind of dances was she making?

David Velasco Downtown dance. Which is, like, this funny category that I try to unpack in the book, whatever that is. So it was, you know, it's a mix of different kinds of flavors of modern like, the things that she studied in school, from Graham to Cunningham to Brown to like, you know, what have you….

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