CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/17/2018

How we love the radicality of Judson Dance Theater in 'The Work Is Never Done'

Between Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which opened at the Brooklyn Museum on Friday, and Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, which opened at MoMA yesterday (see performance schedule here), New York is having a radical 60s moment that feels like a breath of very fresh air in the current climate. Featured image, from the Judson book, is a Peter Moore performance view of Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton in Brown’s Lightfall, Concert of Dance #4, January 30, 1963. For this dance, Paxton and Brown took turns sitting on one another's back, only to be dumped onto the floor as the bent-over partner stood up and gravity did its work. "It was a phenomenal period of experimentation," Brown is quoted, "and olde modern dance, exhausted by the battering it took on all fronts, keeled over like an elephant… tested, then rose again, changed forever." © Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy Paula Cooper, New York.