NEARLY STATIONARY
at Hudson Hall

Dance-theater meets visual art in BARBARA KILPATRICK’s
NEARLY STATIONARY at Hudson Hall

May 7 - June 12, 2022
Conceived and designed by Barbara Kilpatrick
Choreography by Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener
Music by John Cage: String Quartet in Four Parts (1950)
Performed by Four Parts Quartet

Tickets: hudsonhall.org/

Hudson Hall presents Nearly Stationary, a two-part, multi-floor exhibition, installation and performance event conceived by BESSIE award-winning visual artist, Barbara Kilpatrick. Spanning 20 years of sculpture, drawings, photographs, and collaborations with contemporary dance, the first-floor gallery exhibition leads to a second-floor installation of Kilpatrick’s costumes in Hudson Hall’s historic 1855 theater. Central to the installation is a newly commissioned dance work created by Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, who, in a series of fourteen “events” from May 14 to June 5, perform new choreography amid, and in dialogue with, Kilpatrick’s costumes. Musicians will perform John Cage’s meditative String Quartet in Four Parts, the third of which provides the title for the work.

I have come to see the costume as an active, live-art object containing the “soul” of both the performer and the performance. — Barbara Kilpatrick

In Nearly Stationary: Performance and the Still Object at Hudson Hall, Barbara Kilpatrick ponders the question: When a performance is over, what remains? Memories fade, yet what is more tangibly permanent are the costumes and their many functions. “Costumes simultaneously animate and restrict the performer,” says Kilpatrick, “yet when the performance is over, they bear the imprint of performers’ bodies, memorializing their movement, their corporality, and their very being.”

Each sculpture in the first-floor installation references the clothed human body. Several sculptures are dressed in fabric, printed in repeating patterns with twenty years of Kilpatrick’s photographic work. A six-foot toy theater, the centerpiece of her live performance for puppets and dancers at the French Institute/Alliance Française in New York, reinforces the performative element of her work and echoes its origins in her own childhood play.

For over twenty years, Barbara Kilpatrick has collaborated with contemporary choreographers, most notably Vicky Shick to create sculptures, sets and costumes that integrate with the performances and its dancers. Her solo exhibitions have included installations at The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St Mark’s Church, and the New Arts Program in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. In 2012, Kilpatrick’s work Bearskin, a performance for puppets and movement artists, was presented at FIAF (French Institute / Alliance Française). Her photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Dance Magazine, and Village Voice.

Kilpatrick’s collaboration with dancer-choreographer Vicky Shick, Undoing, was recognized with a BESSIE award (New York Dance and Performance Award) for “Outstanding Creative Achievement” in 2003, and, together with Vicky Shick and Elise Kermani, received a BESSIE nomination for "Outstanding Production" for Everything You See in 2013. Kilpatrick’s Keep-Sake was shown at the Ancram Opera House (Ancram, New York) in 2008. Internationally, Kilpatrick, Shick and Kermani have presented work at the Trafo Theatre in Budapest and the Dublin Dance Festival. Her work with Shick and Kermani has been supported by the MAP Fund and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and she has enjoyed residencies at the New Arts Program and at Cill Rialaig in Ballinskelligs, Ireland.

Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener are bringing a welcome dose of kids’-party high jinks to the modern-dance stage. – Joan Acocella

Continuing up Hudson Hall’s center hall staircase to its magnificent performance hall – the oldest surviving theater in New York State – audiences enter a site-specific installation of nineteen of Kilpatrick’s performance costumes. Former Merce Cunningham dancers Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener have been commissioned by Hudson Hall to choreograph a new dance work in dialogue with the installation. The Four Parts Quartet will perform John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts live in the space.

Completed in 1950, Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts – in which Nearly Stationary is the third part – has been touted by classical music critic Mark Swed as “the most exquisitely colored and just plain beautiful American string quartet of its time.” The music—austere, humble, and profoundly beautiful—embodies Cage’s delicate balance of memory and presence, stillness and motion, receptivity and action. “These are themes that have always inspired my work, from its origins in childhood to the present,” says Kilpatrick.

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener are New York-based dance artists. Their work involves the building of collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. They met as dancers in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and since 2010 they have created over 25 multidisciplinary dance works, including site-responsive installations, concert dances, gallery performances, and dances for film in venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barbican Centre, REDCAT, The Walker Art Center, and MoMA/PS1. Throughout they have maintained a commitment to queer culture and aesthetics. Their partnership intentionally blurs authorship and maintains a deep commitment to collaboration with a diverse community of dancers, performers, artists, and cultural institutions.

Rashaun Mitchell is a Guggenheim Fellow (2014), Foundation for Contemporary Art grantee (2013), a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Awardee for both sustained achievement in the work of Merce Cunningham 2004-2012 (2011) and for “Outstanding Emerging Choreographer” (2012), and a Princess Grace Dance Fellowship Awardee (2007).

Silas Riener is a graduate of Princeton University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a Bessie Award-winning dancer, the recipient of Gibney’s Dance-in-Process Residency Award (2015), and Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Cage Cunningham Fellowship (2019).

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Hudson Hall (www.hudsonhall.org) is a cultural beacon in the Hudson Valley, offering a dynamic year-round schedule of music, theater, dance, literature, exhibitions, workshops for youth and adults, as well as family programs and large-scale community events such as Winter Walk and the Hudson Jazz Festival. Located in a historic landmark that houses New York State’s oldest surviving theater, Hudson Hall underwent a full restoration and reopened to the public in April 2017 for the first time in over 55 years. In 2019, through an extensive program encompassing live performance, art exhibitions, city-wide festivals, free community events and workshops, Hudson Hall served an audience of 50,000 and employed over 400 artists and skilled technicians, making it a valuable contributor to Columbia County’s $8 million creative economy. Approximately 70% of Hudson Hall’s programs are free of charge or subsidized to ensure equitable access to the arts.