Exhibition
Performance Archiving Performance
11/06/13-01/12/14
Performances · Exhibition-Related
Sara Wookey Solo: Disappearing Acts & Resurfacing Subjects: Concerns of (a) Dance Artist(s)
Cover Image:
Sara Wookey, Disappearing Acts & Resurfacing Subjects: Concerns of (a) Dance Artist(s), 2013. Photo: Corina Gamma
Programmed in conjunction with “Performance Archiving Performance,” a presentation of works that engage archive as medium, on view in the Fifth Floor Resource Center from November 6, 2013–January 12, 2014.
Sara Wookey performs a new solo work that considers dance as a disappearing act and questions recurring subjects floating in the public sphere—such as the preservation, ownership, and value of dance itself. Through image, movement, and text, Wookey reflects on being a subsidized artist in Europe in the 1990s, a freelance artist creating site-based projects in Los Angeles, and shares a selection of responses to her “Open Letter to Artists,” which prompts thinking about the relationship between artists’ individual professional choices and the sustainability of the field of dance.
Sara Wookey
Sara Wookey is a choreographer and creative consultant working in the United States and Europe. From 1996–2006, she was based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she established her company Wookey Works and taught at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. Since then, her choreographic work has been presented at Links Hall in Chicago, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and REDCAT in Los Angeles. Wookey holds an MFA from the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and works with public practice collectives such as the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, museum education programs such as the Tate Collective, and is a founding member of the Choreographers Working Group. Her writing on dance, urbanism, and labor rights issues for artists has been published in Performance Arts Journal, Movement Research, the International Journal for Art & Technology, Itch, and Performance Club. Wookey is the organizer of reDANCE, a platform for intergenerational transmission in dance, and one of five certified transmitters of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966). She has taught at, among others, the California Institute for the Arts, UCLA, and Cal State University Long Beach, and was the research assistant to Rainer at the University of California, Irvine, from 2009–11. Currently, she is the Outreach Consultant for the Creative Services Department at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) and in her spare time calls square dances for private and public events.
Sponsors
Generous endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
This program is made possible, in part, through the support of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Education and public programs are made possible by a generous grant from Goldman Sachs Gives at the recommendation of David B. Heller & Hermine Riegerl Heller.
