Janine Antoni in collaboration with Anna Halprin

Paper Dance, 2013

Performance with brown paper

Premiered at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA

Rehearsal photographed by Pak Han at the Halprin Dance Deck & Photographed by Carlos Avendano at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA

In 2013, Janine Antoni and Anna Halprin began working on a performance derived from a scene in Halprin’s influential theater work Parades and Changes (1965).  On the deck at Halprin’s Mountain Home Studio in Kentfield, California, Antoni improvised with long rolls of brown paper, making temporary shapes in the material with her body that echoed many of her previous sculptural works. 

Translated into a gallery setting at Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, PA, Paper Dance evolved over fifteen weeks, taking place weekly amidst an assembly of crated objects. Antoni would unpack some of her artworks at the beginning of each performance, installing a slow-time retrospective. A fragment of the fifty-one-year-old film Parades and Changes was projected amidst the artworks in between live performances. Together the artists asked how creative histories could entwine and regenerate themselves.

Paper Dance at the Contemporary Austin on view from January 27 - March 17, 2019