RoseLee Goldberg and Simon Dove Discuss THE LANGUAGES OF DANCE at The Jewish Museum, 12/13

The Jewish Museum will present The Languages of Dance, a conversation with RoseLee Goldberg, founding Director and Curator of Performa, and Simon Dove, co-curator of the Crossing the Line festival, on Thursday, December 13 at 6:30 pm.

Goldberg and Dove will explore ideas about notation and recording dance as reflected in Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol. The exhibition will also be considered in the context of burgeoning art world interest in bringing dance into galleries and museums.

Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol is a unique collaboration featuring Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart engaging the work of Israeli dance composer and textile artist Noa Eshkol in an exhibition integrating a film installation and photographic series by Lockhart with a selection of scores, drawings and wall carpets by Eshkol. Aviva Weintraub, Associate Curator at The Jewish Museum, will introduce the conversation.

Tickets for this program are $15 for the general public; $12 for seniors; $10 for Jewish Museum members; and FREE for students with valid ID. For further information regarding programs at The Jewish Museum, the public may call 212.423.3337. Tickets for lectures, film screenings, and concerts at The Jewish Museum can be purchased online at the Museum's website.

This program is part of Dialogue and Discourse, a new series of conversations featuring artists and scholars exploring topics related to current exhibitions and works in the Museum's collection. Upcoming programs in the Dialogue and Discourse conversation series include artist Sharon Lockhart and Dr. Katy Siegel of Hunter College exploring works on view in the exhibition, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, on February 28.

RoseLee Goldberg is an art historian and the author of the seminal survey, Performance Art from Futurism to the Present, which remains an influential text on the history of performance art. She is Professor of Art History at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. In September, RoseLee Goldberg moderated a panel discussion exploring the history and future of the art world's interest in dance presenting the diverse perspectives of an historian, a choreographer, visual artist, curator, and art critic. The December 13 program at The Jewish Museum continues consideration of this fascinating subject and provides new insights.

Performa is the leading organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century.

Simon Dove is an independent curator and co-curator of Crossing the Line, the French Institute Alliance Française's annual fall festival presenting interdisciplinary works and performances created by artists from around the world in New York. He has had an extensive career as an arts curator, festival director and educationalist.

The Jewish Museum is presenting Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, the East Coast premiere of Sharon Lockhart's latest body of work, through March 24, 2013. In this exhibition, co-organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Lockhart engages the legacy of Noa Eshkol, the Israeli dance composer, theorist, and textile artist who created an innovative notation system that describes virtually every perceptible movement of the body. This exhibition explores aspects of Eshkol's extraordinary practice through several mediums. For the five-channel installation Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol (2011), Lockhart filmed seven dancers in various combinations performing five compositions by Eshkol, each set against a selection of Eshkol's "wall carpets," or textile works. The concepts behind Eshkol's dances are illustrated by spherical models made of wire and mesh, which Eshkol constructed as a teaching aid for the notation method. A series of still photographs by Lockhart documents these objects and conveys the logic of movement they are meant to illustrate in groupings of two to five prints. The film installation and photographic series are accompanied by a selection of documents, notes, and drawings from Eshkol's archive, shedding light on particular aspects of her creative process. In the exhibition's final gallery, Lockhart installed two vibrant examples of Eshkol's work as a textile artist. The "wall carpets," as Eshkol called them, were assembled without cutting any new material, using only found scraps of fabric. The dancers participated by sorting the scraps and sewing the final arrangements. Eventually some 500 wall carpets were created, representing a substantial aspect of Eshkol's oeuvre. Lockhart's five-channel film marks the first occasion in which Eshkol's work in movement and textiles is brought together.

An infrared assistive listening system for the hearing impaired is available for programs in the Museum's S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Auditorium.

Widely admired for its exhibitions and collections that inspire people of all backgrounds, The Jewish Museum is one of the world's preeminent institutions devoted to exploring the intersection of art and Jewish culture from ancient to modern times. The Jewish Museum organizes a diverse schedule of internationally acclaimed and award-winning temporary exhibitions as well as dynamic and engaging programs for families, adults, and school groups. The Museum was established in 1904, when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial art objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary of America as the core of a museum collection. Today, a collection of 26,000 objects is maintained - paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, archaeological artifacts, ceremonial objects, and broadcast media. The collection is among the three largest of its kind in the world and is distinguished by its breadth and quality. It is showcased in the vibrant, two-floor permanent exhibition, Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey, examining the Jewish experience as it has evolved from antiquity to the present.

Museum hours are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am to 5:45pm; Thursday, 11am to 8pm; and Friday, 11am to 4pm. Museum admission is $12.00 for adults, $10.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for children under 12 and Jewish Museum members. Admission is free on Saturdays. For general information on The Jewish Museum, the public may visit the Museum's website at TheJewishMuseum.org or call 212.423.3200. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, Manhattan.

Photo Credit: Jacqueline Chambord