#marfa sounding

Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener with Philip Greenlief: New Work. Fieldwork Marfa Antelope Hills Land. 2017. photo: Jessica Lutz, courtesy: Marfa Live Arts

How does the body register the space between places? This question is a preoccupation of both choreography and minimalist art. The experience of some distances exceeds their measurement, like the 2000-mile trip from Brooklyn to Marfa, Texas.  Three weeks ago, I traveled to the tiny West Texas town (population: 1,981) for Marfa Sounding: Anna Halprin, a three-day program (May 26–28) honoring the Northern California-based choreographer. The journey took me around 14 hours: two New York subway lines, a New Jersey Transit train, two flights, and a 200-mile drive. But the full enormity of the distance didn’t strike me until my flight’s final descent into El Paso. Roused from a catnap in my window seat, I snapped open the hot shade to reveal an area of gently gridded desert as far as I could see. A few minutes later, sparse shrubs and low-lying buildings zoomed into view. After landing, I jumped in my rental car and set off, amid the hardness of the Chihuahuan desert landscape’s flat-topped mountains and arid expanses  Although Marfa’s outsize presence in the art world has been crafted by Donald Judd, this feeling of venturing to the edge where nature and culture met, felt in line with Halprin’s work of translating personal sensation to movement.