Marking the Occasion

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Performance Studies. Dance. ‘Marking the Occasion’ represents the final movement in a year-long engagement with the question, “Can a performance be a rough draft of a written work?” In this case, the rough draft took place at Mount Tremper Arts during a 2019 Watershed Residency. Taking the practices of choreography and co-writing as methods of investigation, curator-editors Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Aisha Willis introduce new trajectories for live work and text by bringing together dance and performance artists from across the US who occupy multiple roles within art economies and in whose work language and writing are prevalent. Exploring a multiplicity of lived, embodied experiences within a single event, ‘Marking the Occasion’ gathers together archival materials from the residency alongside new contributions from participants David Thomson, Julie Tolentino, Mariana Valencia, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Mlondi Zondi. The publication also marks the events of 2020, and traces their reverberations through each artist’s practice as time, movement, action, and collaboration take on new meanings.