PEAK Performances to Present Netta Yerushalmy's MOVEMENT

PEAK Performances at Montclair State University continues to introduce audiences to new work from today's most exciting dance artists with the world premiere of Movement, in which celebrated choreographer Netta Yerushalmy intricately quilts together quotations from a vast array of sources: folk dances, traditional dances and ceremonies, modern and contemporary concert dance, commercial dance, sports, and contemporary life. The work draws from over 100 existing dances, stretching the idea of pluralism until it almost snaps. Movement features a new score by award-winning composer Paula Matthusen and is performed by dancers hailing from Korea, Senegal, Israel, Taiwan, and across the U.S.

Performances of Movement take place at the Alexander Kasser Theater March 17, 18, and 19 at 7:30 PM, and March 20 at 3pm. Running time is 65 minutes, with no intermission. Tickets are $40 (and free for MSU undergraduates, with valid ID) and can be purchased at peakperfs.org or 973.655.5112. Tickets are $10 for anyone with proof or purchase of a ticket to her most recent work, Paramodernities, at New York Live Arts. In support of the artistic community, tickets are also $10 for all artists; these discounted tickets can be purchased using the promo code: DanceArts. The Alexander Kasser Theater is located at 1 Normal Avenue, Montclair, NJ, on the Montclair State University campus.

Netta Yerushalmy's work aims to engage with audiences by imparting the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known, and to challenge how meaning is attributed and constructed. Movement follows Yerushalmy's Paramodernities, a six-part series generated through reverently and violently dissecting iconic modern choreographies (by Nijinsky, Graham, Ailey, Cunningham, Fosse, and Balanchine). The project explored tenets of modern discourse-sovereignty, race, sexuality, disability-with contributions by scholars from different fields, and was created explicitly in order to provoke dynamic conversations with the past and its legacies. "There's the total displacement of my authorship. Who's making this thing? Is it mine?" Netta Yerushalmy asked in a New York Times profile surrounding that work. For Movement, she reopens what she then referred to as the "cabinet of curiosities" of dance. Movement deals with a much greater multitude of much more fragmentary quotational sequences, each bearing their own essential rhythm, time signature, and musicality.

Yerushalmy says of Movement, "When I take a snippet of Israeli folk dance, I know its intrinsic rhythm-I know the song in my head. When I take a snippet of a dance from a well-known contemporary choreographer, I know its timing-I've performed it hundreds of times. When I dance these two snippets in succession, a new kind of rhythmical pattern emerges. This attention to the musicality of movement-when the original music is no longer there-is an exciting and challenging part of working on this piece: the dancers need to shift time-signatures every few seconds. As they dance the radically re-woven/densely juxtaposed material, the rhythmical landscape of MOVEMENT comes to life."

Movement is created with and performed by Burr Johnson, Catie Leasca, Caitlin Scranton, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Hsiao-Jou Tang, Khalifa Babacar Top, and Netta Yerushalmy. The work features original music by Paula Matthusen, dramaturgy by Katherine Profeta, lighting design by Tuçe Yasak, costumes by Magdalena Riley. It is stage managed by Amanda Eno and produced with Miranda Wright and Los Angeles Performance Practice.

Movement is the second of five PEAK Performances presentations that will be captured this season by Alla Kovgan, a filmmaker commensurate with the work being offered-and the state-of-the-art technology used to capture performance-at the Alexander Kasser Theater.

Working with Director of Photography Mia Cioffi Henry, Kovgan captured Donald Byrd and Spectrum Dance Theater's Strange Fruit at the Kasser this month. Following Netta Yerushalmy's Movement, she'll capture Gandini Juggling's Smashed2 (April 21-24), Familie Flöz's Hotel Paradiso (May 5-8), and Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company's Curriculum II (June 9-12). The films will eventually screen on PEAK Performances' PEAK Plus platform, which allows remote audiences to engage with the work of visionaries of contemporary performance.

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