Le fonds documentaire du CCNO

For a brief period in the early 1960s, a group of choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers gathered in Judson Memorial Church, a socially engaged Protestant congregation in New York’s Greenwich Village, for a series of workshops that ultimately redefined what counted as dance. The performances that evolved from these workshops incorporated everyday movements—gestures drawn from the street or the home; their structures were based on games, simple tasks, and social dances. Spontaneity and unconventional methods of composition were emphasized. The Judson artists investigated the very fundamentals of choreography, stripping dance of its theatrical conventions, and the result, according to Village Voice critic Jill Johnston, was the most exciting new dance in a generation.

Through live performance, film, photography, sculptural objects, musical scores, poetry, and archival materials, Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done traces the history of Judson Dance Theater both in and outside the church, from the workshops that took place there to other spaces around downtown New York. Artists in the exhibition include George Brecht, Trisha Brown, John Cage, Al Carmines, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Diane Di Prima, Bill Dixon, Rosalyn Drexler, Judith Dunn, Simone Forti, Gene Friedman, David Gordon, Anna Halprin, Lawrence Halprin, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Storm De Hirsch, Jill Johnston, LeRoi Jones, Allan Kaprow, Fred McDarrah, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Aileen Passloff, Steve Paxton, Rudy Perez, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Elaine Summers, Cecil Taylor, Stan VanDerBeek, James Waring, Robert Whitman, Phyllis Yampolsky, and La Monte Young.

Ralph Lemon (born 1952) is one of the most significant figures to emerge from New York's downtown dance and performance world in the past 40 years. A polymath and shape-shifter, Lemon combines dance and theater with drawing, film, writing and ethnography in works presented on the stage, in publications and in museums. He builds his politically resonant and deeply personal projects in collaboration with dance makers and artists from New York, West Africa, South and East Asia, and the American South. Lemon, who was born in Cincinnati and raised in Minneapolis, describes his explorations as a "search for the forms of formlessness." Absorbing and transmuting fractured mythologies, social history and dance techniques from multiple geographies and decades, Lemon's genre-transcending works perform an alchemy of past and present, reality and fantasy. This book, the first monograph on the artist, features a wide range of texts by scholars and performers, an original photo essay by Lemon and an extensive chronology. MoMA's Modern Dance is a series of monographs exploring dance makers in the 21st century. Each volume focuses on a single choreographer, presenting a rich collection of newly commissioned texts along with a definitive catalogue of the artist's projects.