Marking the Occasion represents the final movement in a year-long engagement with the question, "Can a performance be a rough draft of a written work?" In this case, the rough draft took place at Mount Tremper Arts during a 2019 Watershed Residency. Taking the practices of choreography and co-writing as methods of investigation, curator-editors Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Aisha Willis introduce new trajectories for live work and text by bringing together dance and performance artists from across the US who occupy multiple roles within art economies and in whose work language and writing are prevalent. Exploring a multiplicity of lived, embodied experiences within a single event, Marking the Occasion gathers together archival materials from the residency alongside new contributions from participants David Thomson, Julie Tolentino, Mariana Valencia, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Mlondi Zondi. The publication also marks the events of 2020, and traces their reverberations through each artist's practice as time, movement, action, and collaboration take on new meanings.
Watch video clips from the residency
Further reading
A collection of texts cited throughout the book, Marking the Occasion, and provided by the editors, Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Aisha Willis, as companions to the Mount Tremper Arts residency.
Sarah Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994).
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin Random House, 1977), 206-207.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Maragaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer(Brooklyn: Zone Books, Revised edition, 1988), 181-183.
The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, eds. Bill Bissell and Linda Caruso Haviland (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018).
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017).
Jonathan Burrows, A Choreographer’s Handbook (New York: Routledge, 2010).
Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 54.
Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 392-403.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).
Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: NYU Press, 2019).
Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Princess Nokia, “Young Girls,” in Metallic Butterfly (Rough Trade Records, 2018). Audio.
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso Books, 2011).
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 111.
Mariana Valencia, ALBUM (Brooklyn: Wendy’s Subway, 2018).
Ronaldo V. Wilson, Poems of the Black Object (New York: Futurepoem Books, 2009), 13.
David Wojnarowicz, Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz, ed. Lisa Darms and David O’Neill (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018).
Final Destination, directed by James Wong (Burbank, CA: New Line Cinema, 2000). Film.