Choreographers: Claudia La Rocco got your back.

The 60’s nostalgia that folks have been mainlining during this year’s Performa extravaganza, has been irking me to no small degree. You all know how we feel about this. While I’m down with taking the best things we learned from that era, and moving forward with it–recognizing the present we live in–I hate all of the bellyaching that usually comes from people who were alive then, which isn’t something they earned, but rather, is more an act of chance.

So kudos to L. Ro. when, at the end of her piece on the dance film series focusing on unseen film documents of 60’s Judson and Grand Union dances, she calls out Performa organizer and Performance Art History Guru, Rosalee Goldberg:

…Performa’s founder, RoseLee Goldberg, is wrong to suggest, as she seemed to do in brief remarks Monday, that contemporary New York choreographers must reconnect with the conceptual and intellectual rigor of early postmodern dance. The Judson era may still be a guiding preoccupation in France, but here it has been well digested and is just one more artistic strategy for choreographers making different, more culturally relevant re-evaluations of performance than the landmark but now often dated work of the 1960s and ’70s.

Damn, I felt like I was taking crazy pills! It’s unfortunate, though, that Goldberg comes off as being so out of touch with the dance world.

BTW, has Performa been to Brooklyn lately?