Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/ Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M)

Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M) is the custom-made size in the Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church project.

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Only, in this made-to-measure size, the proposition is inverted and the question becomes “What would have happened if one of the early postmoderns from Judson Church had gone uptown to perform in the voguing ballroom scene in Harlem?” Again, rather than illustrating a historical fiction, what we experience was neither possible at The Balls nor at Judson, but a third possibility is created, here and now.

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In Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem…(M2M), Harrell makes a full-evening work for three dancers which engages the formalism and minimalism of postmodern dance with the flamboyancy and performativity of voguing. Combining these contrasting styles, Harrell repositions the influence of jazz, funk, and rhythm-and-blues on improvisation in early postmodern dance. Likewise, aesthetic and social discourses are transformed when the postmodern dance pedestrian vocabulary of sitting and standing are re-imagined in the context of a Judson Church gathering in Harlem.

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