Polly Motley - In No Time: A Retrospective of Ideas

In No Time is a retrospective of ideas by choreographer Polly Motley. The focus of this "installation of artists" are the ideas of Motley's 30+ year career that continue to stimulate new work. In mining these artistic threads to create new work, a team of regional and national artists will present the creative processes and experiments used to create a new work as well as the new work itself. In No Time includes open "studio-in-the-gallery" process, intermedia performances, talks with the public, lecture-demonstrations and an exhibit of video, costumes, choreographic scores and contextualizing print. These activities will illuminate Motley's work in relation to other contemporary and historical ideas in dance, video and installation art. They will elucidate the highly disciplined craft inherent in Motley's choreography for Count 25 (1987), Drawing From the Body(1999), Dancing the Numbers (2004), and Video Portrait (2013) and examine how these dances relate to the current work. In No Time will expose the thinking and labor of devising maps, scores, projected video images and the interplay between them. The compositional rigor, content and poetics of the elements of In No Time—video, new music, lighting, dance— will create a meditation on impermanence and the experience of time. Motley and collaborators are not young; their eyes are set on the "water flowing underground," on "the beauty of the world is enough" and on the graceful actions of ordinary life. These are the currents of In No Time. A companion book is integral to this project. Writer Sara Smith will research related artistic forms and ideas, interview artists and audience, and work with Motley and curator, Rachel Moore, to enhance our understanding of experimental performance-making.