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Featured Performance
Choreographers' Evening
Curated by BodyCartography Project
November 28, 7:00 pm, November 28, 9:30 pm

“A cornucopia of Twin Cities dance . . . [a] smorgasbord of emerging and mature talent from across the dance spectrum.” —MinnPost

For almost 40 years, Choreographers’ Evening has served as the major gathering for... read more »


Featured Article
Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce
September 2009

Two cardboard coffins, ten pink biscuit wafers, six cans of Harp, a wig, and countless costume changes. . . . Acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh applies the frenetic antics of farce—an inherently British genre—to an Irish immigrant and his two grown sons. Holed up in their grimy London flat,... read more »


Walker Channel
Performing Arts 2009-2010 Season Trailer
Performing Arts 2009-2010 Season Trailer
Monday, August 17, 2009


Welcome,

Each year, the Walker’s performing arts program seeks out and presents the freshest and most significant developments in contemporary dance, theater, and new music from around the world. With four world premieres, seven major commissions, nine artists on their U.S. debut... read more »

Artist-in-Residence
Faustin Linyekula
Artist-in-Residence
May-November 2007

Faustin Linyekula, dancer and choreographer, lives and works in Kinshasa. In 2001, after eight years of self-imposed exile, Linyekula returned to his native Congo with a renewed desire to create art there. He quickly established a company and art center, Les Studios Kabako, which is the only space... read more »


Department Information
As a leading national force since its founding, the Walker Art Center’s Performing Arts Department has been built successfully on a foundation laid by five visionary directors and a level of institutional commitment rare for a contemporary arts center. The Walker began presenting local dance,... read more »


Blog
Reggie Wilson and Andreya Ouamba’s The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn
Lightsey Darst
Sat, 14 Nov 2009

If anyone wants to discuss Reggie Wilson and Andréya Ouamba’s The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn, I think I’ll start things off with a question:

What do you go to dance for—and to what extent did this dance give you that?

And I’ll give a partial answer. One of the things I go to dance for is kinesthetic pleasure—the feeling of the imagined body, the mental map of the body, moving along with the performers on stage. You’d think after five years of being a dance critic, not to mention twenty-five years of dancing, my system would be jaded, responsive only to the most unusual or extreme movements. But as far as I can tell, the kinesthetic sense doesn’t work like that. It’s one of the basic, inexhaustible pleasures of life, like sex or eating. Any time I see an arm reaching to the sky, urge spreading out through the ribcage, I feel the same thrill. Even the minute, waving permutations of a hand are magic.

The Good Dance definitely gave me that—all those sweeps and reaches, plus tiny engines of fine-grained coordination. But the pleasure wasn’t unadulterated. Wilson and Ouamba intentionally (I believe) cut through that pleasure in order to find another aspect of the dance.

I’ll stop there. But what other aspects were you looking for? And what did you find?



Commissions
Marc Bamuthi Joseph
the break/s
Marc Bamuthi Joseph
April 10-12, 2008
Discipline: Verse/Dance/Film

Marc Bamuthi Joseph upends the phrase "think globally, act locally," striving to inject core community values into his work as an international hip-hop artist. "I'm not a stereotypical emblem for what hip-hop culture is or how it gets broadcast around the planet," he says. "Hip-hop is definitely in... read more »


In The Shop
Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections

A primer on contemporary art, the Walker’s new catalogue captures the institution’s multidisciplinary history and reflects many of its commissions and extensive collections of paintings, sculptures, prints, photography, design, film/video, new media, and performing arts. The 616-page volume includes some 350 artist entries coauthored by the Walker’s curators and alumni as well as contributions from a select group of novelists, poets, and critics. $45 ($40.50 Walker members). read more »

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