Five dancers in bright green costumes perform on stage; three extend their legs high, while one hugs their knees and another stands in the background. The stage background is dark, highlighting the dancers’ movements.

Prep School: Movement

The New York premiere of Netta Yerushalmy’s MOVEMENT brings together a tapestry of gesture, using citational practice to explore authority and originality. Learn more here.

Read about the history of dance notation in Anna Heyward’s “How to Write Dance,” in The Paris Review (2015):

How do you tell a person in another place or time what a dance looks like, and how it should be performed? You could use words, describing, second by second, the movements made by every dancer on stage—but inaccuracies would creep in. Take an instruction as simple as “lower your arm”: How would the precise angle, attitude, and displacement of the arm be explained? As an algebraic vector? And what about the hand, the fingers, the knuckles, the rest of the dancer’s body—what are they doing? Such a method would come to resemble programming code, in which reams of language and symbols come to stand for something that’s supposed to look simple and elegant. The problem is that a dance is read by a human, not a machine.

RELATED EVENTS
  • Fri Nov 1 – Sat Nov 2, 2024

Netta Yerushalmy: Movement

  • Dance
  • Skirball Presents
Learn More
indefinite article

Katherine Profeta and Netta Yerushalmy on MOVEMENT

How many different ways of moving do you think your body knows?

READ MORE(opens in a new tab)
Three dancers in green outfits perform barefoot on stage, standing close together with expressive poses, illuminated by dramatic green lighting against a dark background.

GET INTO IT

MOVEMENT Trailer

MOVEMENT research

Netta Yerusalmy in Conversation (2017)

GET THEE TO THE LIBRARY

Recommended readings to get you in gear for the show.

  • Susan Leigh Foster, Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion. Oxford University Press, 2019.
  • Helen Julia Minors, Music, Dance and Translation. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.
  • Megan V Nicely, Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language: Thinking in Micromovement. Chasm: 2023.
  • Anna Pakes, Choreography Invisible: The Disappearing Work of Dance. Oxford University Press, 2020.
  • Leena Rouhiainen, Kirsi Heimonen, Rebecca Hilton, Chris Parkinson, editors, Writing Choreography: Textualities of and Beyond Dance. Routledge, 2024.

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Netta Yerushalmy by Jack Halberstam

Paramodernities is something entirely new, built upon the ruins of aesthetic practices that have become part of a modern vocabulary of expressive culture.

Bomb | April 29, 2020(opens in a new tab)

Netta Yerushalmy is Changing the Way We Look at Balanchine. And Fosse. And Ailey.

In Paramodernities, Netta Yerushalmy deconstructs dance masterworks and presents their movement alongside scholarly essays that contextualize them.

Dance Magazine | August 6, 2018(opens in a new tab)

Viewpoints on Pluralism

EXTRA CREDIT

Yerushalmy’s work plays with poetic strategies of citation, including the cento form. From the Poetry Foundation’s “Glossary of Poetic Terms“:

From the Latin word for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work collaged entirely from other authors’ verses or passages. In their earliest forms, centos were often composed as tribute, such as those by Byzantine empress Eudocia Augusta, which paid homage to Homer. Centos had a resurgence in popularity with the rise of collage as a compositional device among Modernist writers and can be seen in works such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Enjoy these contemporary examples of the cento form.

Simone Muench, “Wolf Cento” from Wolf Centos (2014)

Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf
at a live heart, the sun breaks down.
What is important is to avoid
the time allotted for disavowels
as the livid wound
leaves a trace      leaves an abscess
takes its contraction for those clouds
that dip thunder & vanish
like rose leaves in closed jars.
Age approaches, slowly. But it cannot
crystal bone into thin air.
The small hours open their wounds for me.
This is a woman’s confession:
I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.

Linda Bierds, “Lepidopteran: A Cento” from Poetry (2017)

Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy

In    …    the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net,
in time of the breaking of nations,
and in elementary arithmetic,

the lichen-gray primaries
keep in sufficiently close touch
as to impose one part of a pattern onto another.

The vibrational halo
of the string figures
passing from flower to flower,

border to border —
night-moths of measureless size,
circling

among the young, among the weak and old,
hawk-moths at dusk
hatching

the war-adept in the mornings —
the vibrational halo
near the great wings

is not the judgment-hour,
only thin smoke without flame
written on terrestrial things.

I confess I do not believe in time.
And the highest enjoyment of timelessness
is an imitation game    …    filled with

the mysteries of mimicry    …    But
when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp
and a deadly cipher

flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
what is our solution?
Peace on earth and silence in the sky?

I think that is not
the faith and fire within us    …    Still,
I look into the depth of

each breeding-cage,
each floating-point form
cleft into light and shade,

hoping it might be so.