By imagining a theoretical meeting between Voguing and Post-modern dance, much of Yvonne Rainer’s 1965 «No Manifesto» is put into crisis. Most of the no’s become definite maybe’s: maybe to spectacle, maybe to transformations and magic and make-believe, maybe to the glamour and the transcendency of the star image, maybe to the heroic, maybe to involvement of performer or spectator, maybe to style, maybe to trash imagery, maybe to camp, maybe to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer, and maybe to moving or be moved. The only thing we know for sure is yes to the heroic and we’re adding yes to the tragic.
The Plus Plus version of Antigone Jr. includes a surprise epilogue that takes its cues directly from other sizes of the Twenty Looks series. «Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church» takes a new critical position on postmodern dance aesthetics emanating from the Judson Church period. By developing his own work as an imaginary meeting between the aesthetics of Judson and those of a parallel historical tradition, that of voguing, Trajal Harrell re-writes the minimalism and neutrality of postmodern dance with a new set of signs. Rather than illustrating a historical fiction, these new works transplant this proposition into a contemporary context. What we experience was neither possible at The Balls nor at Judson. In the construction of an imagined audience, that of a 1963 Judson Church Dance Theater audience, in the minds of a real audience today, or put in another way, in the distance between who we imagine a work is being performed for and its actual performance for those present, what kind of new relations can be created, adapted, and reassigned between performer(s) and audience?