Made-to-Measure/ Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church

Combining the formalism and minimalism of post-modern dance with the flamboyant performance style of voguing is the challenge Trajal Harrell takes on in the Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church series, a piece whose subtitle (Judson Church Is Ringing in Harlem) metaphorically summarizes what is at stake. The piece is at the exact geographical and cultural crossroads between the church in the very bohemian Greenwich Village in New York – which in the 1960s was home to an artistic rebellion where Steve Paxton, Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, and others invented a new way of dancing – and the iconic African-American neighborhood which, fifteen years later, was where urban dance and the clubbing revolution blossomed. By combining these two seemingly opposite styles, Harrell reveals how the former, in their experimentation with movement, owe a debt to the fundamentals of jazz, funk, and R’n’B that nourish the latter. Harrell reinvents the aesthetic and social approach of postmodern choreographic vocabulary (walking, standing, sitting, etc.) with a Harlem twist.

Trajal Harrell

For the North American choreographer, founder, and director of the Zürich Dance Ensemble, the body is both a repository of memory and a place of experimentation. His pieces, which combine the heritage of postmodern dance with that of other gestural traditions, from voguing to butoh, are performed in the United States and internationally: notably Romeo in 2023 in the Cour d'honneur of the Festival d'Avignon, and in Paris as part of a Portrait of the Festival d'Automne. In 2025, he received the Silver Lion at the Venice Dance Biennale.