Dance Performance | Sundays on Broadway: Dance and Video

Forming a modern bestiary, Jade Manns's work-in-progress explores the convergence of animal, god, and man through a flurry of gestural fragments. In it we see the cold, angelic spirit of the American modern dancer's disciplined striving for beauty alongside the erratic and disoriented convulsions of man, the neurotic animal. The imagery erratically shifts and rearranges, creating a dense panorama of disparate images in constant counterpoint to one another. The unpredictably fluctuating movement creates a visual representation of the confusion between the natural and the artificial, the divine and the human.

Juliette Mapp will perform a short solo called Free Day. She writes, "Dancing is the experience of creating and holding a free space in my mind and around my body within which I can project and move freely. When I dance, I create a space that does not normally exist--but it can be a reinterpretation or reorganization of that which normally does exist. I believe it is through moving within this free space that a semblance of meaning can emerge for me and the audience, like wandering on a free day."

Jo McKendry's 15 ways to cross a paddock (working title) is a collaboration with dancer Molly Ross. "We like being in our own and each other's bodies, the way that dance is and allows for this," says McKendry. "It's sacredness in this sense. We're half or double the other's age. Somehow this interests us both. The dance isn't exactly about that, but how is it not?"

Cathy Weis has produced a video archive that is a unique record of dance and performance from a dynamic and eclectic period of downtown NYC art-making. Approaching her camerawork with a choreographer's eye, she captured many rare and improvisational performances by emerging and established artists. Weis will be showing footage shot in the theaters and on the streets of NYC between 1985-1987.