Let's declare 2025 as Renzi Legacy Year, for several reasons.
For one, Peter Stathas Dance has invited me to reconstruct an old dance for their company. Just how old you ask? Well, it premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in the fall of 1983, so that makes it over 40 years old. To a Beethoven string quartet, titled What Practice Makes,it's theoretically a dance about the rehearsal process, including lifts that don't get off the ground and a romance between 2 dancers. We workshopped it at Jacob's Pillow's Inside/Out stage earlier that year (see photo below). I've been reminiscing about our free rehearsal space at PS 1 in Queens before it was a museum, summer breezes wafting in through those huge windows. At the time we were a 4-person company: me, Peter, Melissa Matson and Teresa Duggan. Should be interesting to re-visit, with all its flaws - maybe even an opportunity to clarify and improve on it with the help of PSD dancers whose parents were probably toddlers when it was first made!
Live work: 1981-2022 (88 videos)
Dance films 1981-2025 (69 videos)
The library also took the 2-Volume MARTA RENZI NEWSLETTERS books made with Arthur Aviles in 2017, as well as (most of) the paper newsletters themselves.
Don't expect to be able to research them any time soon for that "Renzi Re-considered" paper you're writing. But now if I get hit by a truck my sons don't have to be responsible for pawing through old work.
Speaking of the NYPL, I'm represented in the exhibition there called Room to Move: Dance Theater Workshop and Alternative Histories of Downtown Dance (see photo). Like Jacob's Pillow, DTW was a proving ground for me long ago. So so long ago.
12 comments:
I am so proud of you
That’s wonderful, Marta! Yes, I’ll take you out to dinner if you come to New York City sincerely, Jane Goldberg
I still have a nonprofit Changing, Times Tap Dance company we give very small grants to Tap related projects
Marta, You have been so busy in your dance/film life. I am truly in awe. You make such good, humane work.
What makes me think this might be MJ?
Love it!
Yes, I know - I'm on YOUR mailing list. I have shared it with some young tappers...did the wonderful Brooklyn Toli ever apply?
I'm blushing.
Vida longa à Marta Renzi, que este legado se perpetue e só aumente!
Vida longa à Marta Renzi, que este legado se perpetue e só aumente!
Thank you, Gustavo! Same to you!
Thanks for sharing. So many anniversaries I got to celebrate this year - a butoh studio in Kyoto (30 years), a women's circus arts center in Brisbane (30 or was it 35 years), my own non-profits - one 30 and the other can be counted as either 25 or 10 years depending on how you frame beginnings, and then Petronio's. Great to see you at Jacobs Pillow, which motivated me to look for emails from you and find this missive that I missed when sleeping to get over Asia-to USA jetlag, 9 weeks away. Congrats on all you accomplished. Fantastic. All us younger Hampsters knew/know you cuz you were already famous in our wonderful dancing pond...as you danced on wharfs and in brackish waters and made your films. Now we can all egg each other on..may the creativity continue to flow.
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