December 15: Wendy Perron in conversation with Jed Bark and Barbara Dilley
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery at 6pm EST on Tuesday, December 15, Wendy Perron will discuss her new book The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976 with Jed Bark and Barbara Dilley.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, December 15 at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976 by Wendy Perron (Published by Wesleyan University Press, 2020)
The Grand Union was a leaderless improvisation group in SoHo in the 1970s that included people who became some of the most important figures in postmodern dance: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Barbara Dilley, David Gordon, and Douglas Dunn. Together they unleashed a range of improvised forms, from peaceful movement explorations to wildly imaginative collective fantasies. This book delves into the "collective genius" of Grand Union and explores their process of deep play. Drawing on hours of archival videotapes, Wendy Perron seeks to understand the ebb and flow of the performances. Includes sixty-five photographs.
Photo: Da Ping Luo.
Wendy Perron had a thirty-year career as a dancer/choreographer. She danced with the Trisha Brown Company in the 1970s and choreographed more than forty works for her own group. She has taught dance at Bennington, Princeton, and City College, and has lectured across the country. The Editor in Chief of Dance Magazine from 2004–2013, Wendy has also written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, vanityfair.com, and publications in Europe and China. She has co-curated exhibits on the intersection of dance and art for Grey Art Gallery, Loretta Howard Gallery and the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts. She teaches at The Juilliard School and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Jared Bark is an interdisciplinary artist who uses a variety of eccentric materials and methods in making his work. He joined Holly Solomon Gallery in 1975 and has recently exhibited at Chart Gallery and Yancey Richardson Gallery, where the exhibition Jared Bark: Time and Materials is currently on display. He toured with his own performance pieces in the US and Europe during the 1970s and also performed in works by Trisha Brown, Robert Whitman, and Deborah Hay. In the mid-80s, Bark focused his attention on the framing company that still bears his name. After a twenty-year break, he returned to the studio. He created a new version of his performance piece, Krishna Concrete (1977), which was performed at the Whitney Museum in 2014. Bark recently designed sets for theater productions by Jill Kroesen and Sibyl Kempson. Having returned to studio work in 2012, he sold the framing company to his employees in 2016.
His works are in many collections: including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Centre Pompidou; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art.
Barbara Dilley is trained in classical ballet, then studied and performed dance in New York City (1960–1975) with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1963–1968), Yvonne Rainer (1966–1970), and Grand Union, a dance/theater collaboration that extended the definitions of improvisation (1970–1976). She created the ensemble Natural History of the American Dancer; Lesser Known Species (1971–1975) to study and perform structured improvisation. She moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1974, designing the Dance/Movement Studies program at Naropa University, serving as President (1985–1993), and retiring from the faculty in 2015. Her memoir and teaching handbook This Very Moment: teaching thinking dancing was published in 2015 by Naropa University Press.