David Velasco Libros

MoMA Dance is a new series of monographs exploring dance makers in the twenty-first century. Each volume focuses on a single contemporary choreographer, presenting a rich collection of newly commissioned texts along with a definitive catalogue of the artist's projects. Accessible, informative, and inspiring, they are indispensible guides to contemporary dance for fans and scholars alike. Born in Cincinnati and raised in Minnesota, Ralph Lemon is one of the most significant figures to emerge from New York's downtown dance community in the 1980s. His politically resonant and deeply personal projects are investigations of race, identity, memory, and mourning. A polymath and self-described conceptualist, he combines dance with visual art, film, and ethnography, creating works that live on the theater stage, in print, and in the museum. The book features texts by scholars and performers, an original photoessay by Lemon, and an extensive chronology, greatly enhancing the understanding and appreciation of Lemon's boundary-pushing body of work.

Since shocking audiences in 1993, at age 19, with his radically sparse À bras le corps, Boris Charmatz (born 1973) has emerged as one of France's leading choreographers. Whether he's creating a dance composed solely of everyday actions, working with an ensemble of children or running a "dancing museum," Charmatz's work experiments with the body as a vessel for subjectivity, history and collective action. Featuring original essays and interviews and an oral history by Charmatz's contemporaries, this book is the first to explore the many facets of his career--as choreographer, writer and director of France's Musée de la danse.