Dance-Adam Linder
Access: General Ticket or Ticket Villa
ADAM LINDER
Shelf Life
(blood/barre/brain/cells)
Performers: Leah Katz, Justin Kennedy, Mickey Mahar, Brooke Stamp
Commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York
With Shelf Life, a work for four dancers originally conceived for MoMA’s Kravis Studio, Linder acknowledges that dance is already part of the museological context and departs from his previous series of Choreographic Services which were asserting a method for how choreography could be at work within the visual arts. Shelf Life is an iterative performance which began with three central elements: the barre, the blood and the brain and has expanded to include the cells for this occasion in Serralves Villa. These choreographic organs work in concert with each other and the architecture in which they are active, to produce a metaphorical nervous system for dance. The barre, where movement begins, is a home base for the sustained endurance of the dancers’ skills; the blood is the energy force that propels the body through space and in relation to other bodies; the brain—performed simultaneously by a pair of dancers—is the eyes and ears of the system, characterized by our most fundamental animal behaviour; and the cells, offer stimulation to this system from a new generation. Shelf Life, enacted as a choreographic system, probes varying metabolic registers of human and machine, to mediate on the physical finitude of a dancer’s performing body.
Adam Linder is a choreographer who works across theatrical and gallery settings. Many of his works focus on experimenting with and re-articulating certain forms, genres and contexts for dance and the performing arts. Text, costuming, sound production and film are all considered part of his role as choreographer, in which there tends to be a gesamtkunstwerk approach to his performances. His recent solo or two-person shows include Museum of Modern Art (2020); South London Gallery (2018); Kunsthalle Basel (2017) and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2016). In 2018, CCA Wattis initiated the survey FULL SERVICE, which travelled to Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg in 2019. Amongst others, his stage work have been presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Kampnagel, Hamburg; REDCAT/Calarts Theater Los Angeles; Sadler’s Wells, London; PICA, Portland and Biennale Danza, Venice.
Adam Linder has participated in the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016), the Liverpool Biennial (2016) and Made in LA (2016) at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, for which he was awarded the Mohn Prize for artistic excellence. Resulting from the prize was the publishing of a monograph Who Is Surfing Who. In 2021, he premiered his most recent stage work LOYALTY and was commissioned to make the film Violence’s Detour for Ballet de Lyon. In 2022, Shelf Life (MoMA, 2020) will be shown at Serralves Museum in Porto and he will make a new stage work for Ballet de Lorraine in season 2022/2023.
Performers: Leah Katz, Justin Kennedy, Mickey Mahar, Brooke Stamp
Leah Katz is a dance artist, originally from Massachusetts, who lives and works in Berlin. She received her BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase in 2009. Katz has performed and collaborated internationally including with Adam Linder, Tino Sehgal, Alexandra Pirici, Jeremy Shaw/Justin F. Kennedy, Dafna Maimon, Kat Válastur, Liz Magic Laser & Sanya Kantarovsky, Deutsche Oper Berlin, and Staatsoper Berlin. She was the recipient of a 2017 DanceWEB scholarship.
Justin F. Kennedy is a dance artist from St. Croix, Virgin Islands. He studied dance and ethnic studies at Wesleyan University and choreography at HZT Berlin, and lead workshops about trance dance and science fiction opera. Kennedy has performed with and for many artists, including Emma Howes, Mark Fell, Tino Sehgal, Ligia Lewis, Jeremy Shaw, Adam Linder, Peaches, FaustinLinyekula, and Wu Tsang.
Mickey Mahar is a dancer and performer, originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who lives in Berlin. He works primarily with artists that create performances within visual art contexts, and most recently has collaborated with Anne Imhof and Maria Hassabi. Since graduating from Vassar College in 2012, Mahar has worked professionally in venues around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, Kunsthalle Basel, Hamburger Bahnhof, and Tate Modern, as well as
at Documenta 14 and the 57th Venice Biennale.
Brooke Stamp is an Australian dancer, choreographer, and educator. Her career spans two decades, and includes a prolific body of work with Melbourne-based experimental dance company Phillip Adams BalletLab. Stamp has performed works by Adam Linder, Miguel Gutierrez, Maria Hassabi, Rebecca Hilton, and Shelley Lasica, and has collaborated regularly with the Australian artist Agatha Gothe-Snape. Stamp is currently undertaking her PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne.