Emptiness, stillness, and refusal are sources of great creativity to the Brooklyn-based artist, Gillian Walsh.
At the core of her work is a love-hate relationship with the medium of dance, a friction that often translates into highly formalist performances which can feel uninviting at first sight. Behind the seemingly hermetic surface of Walsh’s repetitive dances, however, lies a sincere attempt to carve out a new role for dance as an artistic medium to experiment with non-capitalist temporalities and create new spaces for collective experiences.
The title of Walsh’s new work, Fame Notions, is an anagram of Yvonne Rainer’s famous No Manifesto (1965), a historic reference to another artist’s attempt to expand the notion of what dance can do. Instead of just criticizing formalist conventions, however, Walsh takes her critique a step further and situates dance’s materialist foundations as inherently alienating.
