Wednesday, April 6, 2016 – Saturday, April 23, 2016
Performances
Wed – Fri: 7PM
Saturdays: 4PM

Exhibition
Wed – Sat: Noon – 6pm

Icebox Project Space
(in the Crane Arts Building)
1400 N. American Street
Philadelphia PA 19122

Tickets: $20 PURCHASE ONLINE

Pew Fellow Meg Foley presents ACTION IS PRIMARY, an exhibition and performance series featuring photographic, moving-image, sonic, and written documentation of up to 750 dances Foley has performed on a daily basis at 3:15pm. Foley trained three additional dancers–Kristel Baldoz, Marysia Stoklosa, and Annie Wilson in her improvisational practice. They have contributed to the resulting exhibition documenting the development of the creative process, facilitated by New York City-based choreographer Jeanine Durning.

Since October 2012 (except for part of her recent pregnancy), Foley has performed a dance wherever she is at 3:15pm daily. Her only task is to do a dance at 3:15pm. It can be of any length, of any size, of any intention. From October 23, 2015 to April 23, 2016, Foley and the collaborating performers have been performing and documenting daily 3:15 dances.

This is a shallow engagement with the practice, beginning with what’s present and moving and making from there in dialogue with the immediate moment and context. The accumulation of dances raises questions of what constitutes a dance–the where, the when, the how, and the assumptions made in typical construction–and over time, examines how dances made in the moment can exist across many nows.

The exhibition, curated by Marissa Perel, takes its name from an improvisational practice Foley has been developing and researching since 2010. ACTION IS PRIMARY is a mode of making in the moment that examines how attention, imagination, and embodied presence, are reflected through form. How do we engage with what’s already present, bring what’s inside to the outside and the background to the foreground? Can we simultaneously engage in self-determined research and build something together with our fullest, perhaps contradictory, and most multiple selves (as many as we want)?

With the intention of “holding what you are doing at the center of what you are doing, even as you let it slip towards new centers,” ACTION IS PRIMARY involves a structured score of tactics to rigorously practice paying attention. The experience of navigating these tactics and the degrees of intention and responsiveness in doing so is synonymous with the choreography.

This project is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York and Adam Mickiewicz Institute.