A WORK IN PUBLIC SPACE BY THOMAS HIRSCHHORN, PRODUCED BY DIA ART FOUNDATION NEW YORK
LOCATED AT FOREST HOUSES, THE BRONX - NEW YORK CITY, SUMMER 2013
The dancer Joshua Knight, also known as “Delite” was the guest performer to last
week’s “Running Event.” He danced accompanied by friend and regular visitor to the
monument Jamal Foster, a remarkable dancer and wordsmith on his own right. The duet
performed in the style known as "Get lite” or "Lite feet" showing the mechanics of
movement through a logic of improvisation and timing. They sculpted their sequences
to the clap from the audience against the music. The solemnity of their facial gestures
were only interrupted by the occasional burst of a smile after achieving a difficult
move like jumping over their own leg or doing a shoe trick. Days later, during Marcus
E. Green's seminar title "Gramsci on Intellectuals and Culture" the memory of their
performance will lure as a backdrop to Green's words. The seminar, organized around
14 quotes culled from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, started with the topic of the intellectual
and Gramsci's term "spontaneous philosophy" which stands as a straightforward defense
of the vernacular. When thinking of the role of the vernacular in recent examples
of contemporary dance the name of Yvonne Rainer comes to mind. The energized body
of the subaltern has been a recurring motif in her recent choreographies granting
the leading roles to concentration and endurance, or what I like to think as a methods
of recuperation, that return ownership to the body of the dancer. In dance as in
other forms of art, the immediacy of the vernacular no doubt remains a latent force
field for resistance.
