antigone sr. (english version)

As choreographer Trajal Harrell tells the audience at the start of the show, his series Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church, comes in eight sizes. Antigone Sr. is touted as the large variety. There exist smaller sizes, and XL, and there is a made to measure version too. He’s been at this for several years now, and it’s smart marketing, as it gets the work iterated in different scales.

Regardless of the size, the proposition remains the same: “What would have happened in 1963 if a voguer from a New York house ball strutted downtown to Greenwich Village from Harlem to perform alongside the collective of Judson Church postmodernists?” These dancers, composers, and visual artists challenged the prevailing modern dance aesthetic, and its use of narrative, myth, and psychology. In the face of bright lights, costumes and makeup, the big personalities and presentation, the Judson artists engaged in radical choices for the time, and embraced the ordinary and the pedestrian with a spare austerity. Fragmentation, juxtaposition, loosely structured scores were all part of the minimalistic immediacy and essentialism of the work. 

Harrell continues, saying that this is not a ...