November 17, 2015, 7:30pm-9pm
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
6522 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90028
School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is a temporary dance school and home for dance company, WXPT. Taking up the ‘dance school’ as a form of physical and social sculpture, it offers the general public a regular schedule of movement classes, events and performances small and large, within the space of and as activation to the surrounding installation. The sessions are taught by paggett, the company members and extended community of WXPT, artists whose offerings respond to the question: “What is a Black dance curriculum today?”
In this talk, taisha paggett, along with members of WXPT, will discuss the notion of the dance company and the curriculum as compositions of public and personal relations, which act as performances both visible and invisible. These thoughts will be discussed though paggett’s current collaborative projects, WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees), The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, and other recent work and sketches. We will discuss and physically lead some of the choreographic strategies and movement exercises developed with WXPT, which play with weight exchange, gravity, proximity and interdependence as architectural anchors within these long-form performance projects. We will address the role of the individual within the collective and the formation of a social structure—a school, a company—as a strategy for pushing up against the temporal and formal expectations of performance, the black dancing body, and notions of resistance.