PLATFORM 2012: JUDSON NOW

A talk by Judy Hussie-Taylor.

July, 1962 marked the first performances of a radically diverse group of artists under the umbrella of Judson Dance Theater. During the four most active years of Judson Dance Theater (1962-1966) hundreds of choreographers, visual artists, poets, musicians and filmmakers experimented with new modes of performance composition and in so doing changed the course of art and dance history. In 2012 Judy Hussie-Taylor, executive and artistic director of Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, invited many of the original Judson Dance Theater artists as well as a new generation of artists to consider the impact of Judson on their work today. Hussie-Taylor will talk about organizing PLATFORM 2012: Judson NOW which included live presentations by Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Meredith Monk and Carolee Schneemann, among many other contemporary artists.

About Judy Hussie-Taylor, Executive and Artistic Director Danspace Project

Ms. Hussie-Taylor is the former Director of the nationally acclaimed Colorado Dance Festival (CDF), she has also served as Artistic Director for Performance Programs at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and Deputy Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. From 2000 – 2004 she taught in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Colorado-Boulder and served as faculty, committee member and interim director of the Department’s Visiting Artist Program. Through her work at CDF, she co-developed two multi-year National Endowment for the Arts projects including “Let’s Dance: The Americas” and participated in the National Performance Network and the National Dance Project. From 2005 – 07 she served as a consultant and on the faculty for the National Dance Project’s Regional Dance Development Initiative (Pacific Northwest and San Francisco Bay Area Dance Labs). Since taking the helm at Danspace Project she has developed a critically-acclaimed series, featured in The Sunday New York Times (Arts & Leisure Section, April 11, 2010), entitled the PLATFORMS which features artist curators and new contexts for dance presenting. As part of this program she has developed a series of catalogues published by Danspace Project. She has recently been a participant at the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center’s Making Time symposium (April, 2012); was invited to give a special series of three lectures on performance curation at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (spring, 2012); and was the curator of PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now celebrating the 50th anniversary of Judson Dance Theater. From 2010 – 2013 she participated in public presentations at APAP, Dance USA, and NYS Dance Force convenings as well as collaborated with the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Media and Performance Art to develop ancillary programming for the dance series Some sweet day curated by Ralph Lemon at MoMA. She is currently program advisor for and on the faculty of the new Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, a program of Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University. In 2013 she was featured as one of New York’s “Movers and Shapers” by the New York Times (Arts & Leisure, September 20, 2013) and was conferred with a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.