”Over-the-top theatricality and matter-of-fact banality collide as the four performers offer a succession of personalities” – The New York Times
«Harrell is exceptionally smart in his approach to (M) a.k.a (M)imosa, investigating what constitutes contemporary dance with glamour, humor, and wit. ...Themes of gender, sexuality, and race are played out on the stage in a theatrical but unpretentious matter.» – www.brooklynrail.org
«What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?» – Trajal Harrell
Inspired by Paris is Burning, the seminal documentary film about voguing; their personal research on voguing; and their collective experience as makers, the four collaborators in «(M)imosa» dare to own and share the immediate distance between themselves, between them and their inspiration, between what they portend and what they perform, and between their counteracts.
«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?