Peggy Jarrell Kaplan

The Ronald Feldman Gallery will exhibit photographic portraits of choreographers and their dancers by Peggy Jarrell Kaplan. Selected from twenty-five years of work, the exhibition includes Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, Kazuo Ohno, William Forsythe, and, from a new generation, Boris Charmatz, Ann Liv Young, and Christopher Williams.

Special events related to performance will take place at the Feldman Gallery in conjunction with the exhibition.

Kaplan’s collection, an historic archive of choreographers who have influenced the direction of international contemporary dance and an up-to-date record of emerging choreographers, includes postmodern dance from New York (the early Judson Church Theater and their heirs), dance and physical theater from Europe, butoh and new dance from Japan, and Eastern Europe performance.

In choosing to photograph performing artists in the photographer’s studio – a different kind of stage – Kaplan plays upon the tension between feeling and artifice. She uses the portrait genre to approach dance obliquely, conveying qualities related to performance, but not its replication. Each image offers a visual translation of the body, lending a unique and personal identity to each artist’s larger work.

Peggy Jarrell Kaplan’s portraits have been exhibited internationally at dance festivals and at performing arts venues. Her portraits were selected by Pina Bausch for inclusion in her 2004 dance festival in Düsseldorf, and Mikhail Baryshnikov commissioned her work to accompany the White Oak Dance Project’s tour of PASTforward. Her photographs have been exhibited at the French Institute Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut, and The Lincoln Center Museum and Library of the Performing Arts in New York, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

An exhibition by Peggy Jarrell Kaplan, Subject to Arrest: Portraits of Russian Artists 1984 - 1995, is on view at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street, through December 15.

Peggy Jarrell Kaplan
CONTEMPORARY DANCE
PORTRAITS OF CHOREOGRAPHERS 1981 – 2006