MANCC Welcomes Visiting Artist Neil Greenberg
The Things Themselves!
October 29 – November 11
The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography is pleased to host Neil Greenberg in residence to continue to develop his project To The Things Themselves!. Neil Greenberg, a former dancer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, has been making his own dances since 1979.
Long obsessed with the particular kinds of meaning that dance can create (sensual, perceptual, phenomenological), Greenberg focuses on how we construct meaning in dance and in life.
On the title of his best known work, Not-About-AIDSDance (1994), Greenberg brings focus to the word “about,” raising questions of representation, narrative, and culturalsituatedness inherent to art-making.
Acknowledging the impossibility of divorcing any human product from the context in which it was made, Greenberg comes to MANCC to develop To The Things Themselves!, which proposes to provoke an experience of the performance moment in and of itself, in addition to, and inclusive of the multiple interpretations or associations summoned for, and by, the viewer.
This project will continue Greenberg’s interest in spurring a phenomenological engagement with the performance moment by presenting different assemblages of dance “objects,” while also complicating the approach by exposing the cultural situated-ness of performance actions. To The Things Themselves! proposes that an experience of “the thing itself” necessarily includes the conditions of a phenomenon’s production and reception, both. This evening length work for multiple dancers is built upon a movement generation practice that Greenberg has long employed, and is developing now in collaboration with composer James Lo, who will provide an original score for the work.
Working with props, both as performative objects and as static things, Greenberg envisions audiences seated in the round, emphasizing not only the multiple interpretations, but also vantage points, as viewers watch both the dance and themselves, watching the dance together.
To The Things Themselves! premieres Dec 5-15, 2018 at The Chocolate Factory Theater. This residency is supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Entrypoints:
Public Work-in-Progress Showing:
Thursday, November 8th, 6:00PM, Montgomery Hall, Studio 404
Supported by:
