Trajal Harrell, Friend of a Friend

Event / Performance / Dance

Live-streamed on the Fondation Cartier and Performa websites.

A proposition by Trajal Harrell, imagined for and in the exhibition Sarah Sze, Night into Day, at the Fondation Cartier

With dancers: Titilayo Adebayo, Vânia Doutel Vaz, Maria Ferreira Silva, Trajal Harrell, Thibault Lac, Mel Lecornet, Perle Palombe, Stephen Thompson, and Ondrej Vidlar
Costume and Soundtrack design: Trajal Harrell
Wardrobe Manager: Sally Heard
Production for Trajal Harrell: Lena Appel and Cause Celebre
Diffusion for Trajal Harrell/Cause Celebre: Art Happens
Live-streaming production: Sombrero and Co
Live-streaming director: Thierry Villeneuve
Production: Les Soirées Nomades, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Presented in collaboration with Performa

Choreographer Trajal Harrell invites a number of dancers to the Fondation Cartier for an exceptional live-streamed event. Together, they will revisit his repertoire and create a tailor-made Nomadic Night performance, for and in the exhibition Night into Day, by his friend Sarah Sze, lasting six, uninterrupted hours from dusk into the depths of the Parisian night.

New-York choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell and American visual artist Sarah Sze have been friends for a long time. In 2010, they collaborated on The Untitled Still Life Collection where, connected by a single thread, Harrell experimented with matter, and Sze with movement.

Although the exhibition Sarah Sze, Night into Day presented at the Fondation Cartier is still closed to the public, the Nomadic Nights program has invited Trajal Harrell to take over its exhibition spaces. Inspired by Merce Cunningham’s Events, the choreographer explores his own body of work and invites eight dancers, both male and female, to create alongside him, an site-specific, never-seen-before performance from dusk into the dead of night, complete with soundtrack and costumes. Friend of a Friend is a declaration of friendship from the choreographer to his friend on the other side of the Atlantic, which he chooses to share with the public.

Biography

Trajal Harrell is an American dancer and choreographer. He shot to fame with his series of work entitled Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church in which he confronted the history, construction, and interpretation of contemporary dance. Today, Harrell is considered one of the most important choreographers of his generation.

Trajal Harrell’s performances have been presented in festivals in France (Festival d’Automne in Paris, Festival d’Avignon), New York (Performa 11), Manchester (Manchester International Festival), Vienna, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Montréal, and the Netherlands, and in countless venues across the United States. He has performed in numerous cultural venues like MoMA, New Museum, MoMA PS1, Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Barbican Center, the Fundação Serralves, Centre Pompidou-Metz and Paris, Kanal Pompidou, Art Basel, Lafayette Anticipations, and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. In 2018, Tanz Magazine named Trajal Harrell their “Dancer of the Year”. Currently, his company is based in the Schauspielhaus Zurich, where he continues a long-term research in the aesthetic relationship between early modern dance and Japanese butoh dance.