In the Heart of the Country: Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)
Trajal Harrell

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw shows the second from the series of three innovative performances by New York performance artists, who will work with the current new presentation of the collection to expand its frame and outline to new boundaries, interactions, notions, and readings.

"Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)"  is the last dance work in an expansive six works series "Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church", conceived by Trajal Harrell, an American choreographer and dancer. The project is Harrell’s in-depth critical reexamination of the seminal minimalist attitudes and aesthetics of postmodern American dance and those of Harlem pop tradition of voguing and its drag ballroom scene and culture. "What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the Voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early post-moderns at Judson Church?" is a challenging proposition repositioning social and aesthetic politic of dance and movement.

Voguing has been an element of this deeper running current in history of pop culture, that of performance of self-creation and identity as vehicles for individual and social empowerment (brilliantly depicted in the famous 1991 documentary "Paris is Burning" about “house” subculture). Were we to look in the museum context for the dance of flamboyancy, exuberance, opulence, affect, and emotions, such an unstable barometer would indicate to us the works of Miron Bialoszewski, Krzysztof Niemczyk, and Jack Smith.

Trajal Harrell is a choreographer and dancer who is based in New York and Athens. He recently performed "Shirtology" of Jérôme Bel for “20 Dancers for the XX Century,” a project conceived by Boris Charmatz and presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (October 2013). Harrell is currently researching butoh and Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata for an upcoming dance commission at the MoMA in New York. His works have been presented widely at multiple international dance festivals and venues: Impulstanz Festival- Vienna; Paris Festival d’Automne; Danspace Project, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Cialo/Umysl in Warsaw; and in the museums such as MoMA New York, Walker Art Center, PS1 MoMA, ICA Boston, New Museum, among many others.

Choreographer: Trajal Harrell
Dancers: Rob Fordeyn, Trajal Harrell, Thibault Lac
Costume Design: complexgeometries
Sound Design: Trajal Harrell

First presented 11-13 October, 2012 at Danspace Project, New York.

Co-Production: Tanz im August, Danspace Project for Platform 2012: Judson@50, MoMA PS1, and Hau Hebbel am Ufer.

"Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (M2M)" was made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation and by Danspace Project's 2012-2013 Commissioning Initiative, which receives major support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

International Distribution & Production: Key Performance
Photography: Ian Douglas