Project Proposal For Benjamin Millepied @ LA Dance Project
This proposal asks Benjamin Millepied and LA Dance Project to collaborate on a work of dancers at rest, filmed in four-minute intervals after the devastation of the Covid-19 shutdown. Williams frames stillness not as inactivity but as a charged image of suspended time, lost careers, interrupted bodies, and the fragile temporality of performance. The letter situates the project in a lineage of anti-action and durational refusal, from Paul Taylor's Duet to Cage, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Beckett. Against the glamour of dance as virtuosity, it asks the dancer's resting body to bear the history of missed performances and professional precarity. The work becomes a memorial to the culture that did not happen, and to the bodies trained for events that disappeared.
- DATE:
- September 7, 2021
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Letter / Open Letter
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Benjamin Millepied; Bryan Reynolds; Paul Taylor; John Cage; Robert Rauschenberg; Andy Warhol; Samuel Beckett; Alice Mathis; Hamilton; Hamilton
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- LA Dance Project; University of California-Irvine; The Estate of LG Williams; Medical Problems of Performing Artists
- KEYWORDS:
- dancers at rest; suspended time as image; lost careers documented; stillness as charged form; anti-action and durational refusal; resting body bearing history; missed performances memorialized; culture that did not happen