"Is there a form to a shared togetherness? Are there rules that generate that form? How to trace and project the connective tissue that constitutes togetherness? How to display a new social body?"

this time we'll keep it a secret, Triple Canopy
Martin Beck

The works shown in Talk mark a return to Maryanne’s movement practice and each piece is in collaboration with either Sarah or Lauren, both professional dancers. Collaboration and the process of shared-togetherness(1) is so crucial to this new work that it feels a little weird to credit Maryanne solely in writing, like it should be Maryanne-Sarah-Lauren. It matters(2) that you know this, about the process, and about the work that takes place outside of what is on view, because Maryanne-Sarah-Lauren’s new work is largely about being-in process.

Maryanne–Sarah –Yam–Tablecloth

This show takes its title from Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk; a book of transcribed audio recordings that describe the friendship between three thirty- year olds living in the 1965 art milieu of New York. Esmé Hogeveen calls Talk (the book) a project of examining how experiences themselves are always made and unmade – understood, challenged and reinterpreted – according to how they are articulated in the present(3), and, it’s not a far stretch to extend this description to the works shown in Talk (the art). 

Maryanne–Lauren-Labyrinth–Red Cords

Producing this text was a collaborative process with Maryanne, and in the spirit of Talk, this is a self-conscious foray into writing about someone’s work who I have just begun to know. In the process of figuring out what this text might become, we talked. We talked about all sorts of things: about my relationship to my mother, trying to move beyond the feminism we grew up with, intimate encounters, forms of learning, ex-lovers. The time Maryanne makes in her collaborative work for acknowledging the moments of intimacy and vulnerability that come with forming a new creative relationship is what fills the space between playfulness, performance, and pleasure in Talk.

You-Me-Maryanne -Lauren-Sarah-Clay-Strawberry- Stranger- Grief-Weather- Dirt-Dog- Apple-Farmer-Pleasure

Donna Haraway says it matters how kin generate kin(4), coining the term OddKin to describe the need for unexpected collaborations and combinations to deal with (survive) our present climactic-social-political circumstances. Dance, touch and movement become OddKin-making activities in Maryanne-Sarah-Lauren’s Talk. As much room for non-verbal choreographic input is extended to a yam, a strawberry, an apple, as there is for the two women we see. Each scene is presented to us on a moment-by-moment basis, inviting us to witness the possibilities held in each touch and each fleshy encounter (human or fruit).

Aubyn O'Grady

(1) "Is there a form to a shared togetherness?” is question borrowed from this time we’ll keep It a secret by Martin Beck, Maryanne shared this early in our process.  
(2) From Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Donna Haraway: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
(3) Esmé Hogeveen also describes Talk as “a living object that exists self-consciously within a broader cultural history” in C Magazine issue 129.
(4) This is quote is from an article titled Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin published in the journal Environmental Humanities.