Trajal Harrell: Antigone Sr./Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church

Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church comes in fives sizes: Extra Small (XS) to Extra Large (XL). Following the sublime (S), the rare beauty of (XS), and the spectacular (M)imosa, the Antigone Sr./(L) presents an all-male contemporary dance version of Sophocles’s Greek tragic drama Antigone. All five sizes share the proposition: What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the Voguing ball scene in Harlem had come downtown to perform alongside the early postmodernists at Judson Church? Rather than illustrating a historical fiction, these new works transplant this proposition into a contemporary context. What we experience was neither possible at the balls nor at Judson, but, here and now, a third possibility is created.