Dance/Draw

Dance/Draw
Institute of Contemporary Art / ICA
100 Northern Avenue
Boston MA, 02210

Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1993. Performance with Loving Care hair dye in “Natural Black,” Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, September 10, 1993. Photographed by Prudence Cumming Associates, Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. © Janine Antoni.

“Although dance and the visual arts have enjoyed a long relationship, it has traditionally been comprised of artists creating sets for performances. Recently, however, many visual artists have incorporated dance into their work, and some dancers have experimented with drawing.
Dance/Draw assembles work by nearly 40 artists and explores the multi-layered relationship between contemporary dance and the drawing of the past 40 years.
During the period after World War II, modern dance deviated from the strict codes of traditional ballet en pointe, adopting everyday gestures and natural, childlike play into its standard repertoire. So too contemporary drawing abandoned the confines of technical perfection and frequently left the picture frame altogether. In both dance and drawing the line, as an independent means of expression, was liberated from the historical ideal of perfect form, and instead appears as a mobile, open-ended element capable of exploring a wide range of ideas dealing with history and memory, as well as the expressive potential of the body.”
http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/dance_draw/

“With approximately one hundred works by fifty artists, in media spanning video, photography, drawing, sculpture, and live performance, the Boston ICA’s seventy-fifth-anniversary show, “Dance/Draw,” promises a substantial reconsideration of the relationship between the visual arts and dance over the past half century. Arranging the work into thematic sections (“More Than Just the Hand,” “The Line in Space,” “Dancing,” “Drawing”), the show will analogize the liberation of the line from the page (think Eva Hesse or Fred Sandback) to the eschewal of traditional ballet en pointe in favor of everyday actions (e.g., Yvonne Rainer) and trace this correlation up through the work of contemporary artists such as Fiona Banner, Jesse Aron Green, Klara Lidén, and Rashaad Newsome. For the show’s catalogue, curator Helen Molesworth, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Catherine Lord, and Paul Chan will elaborate on the porosity of these practices.”
http://artforum.com/museums/id=28925&view=print