The Disco Project Installation

Greene Naftali, NYC (2021)
white columns, NYC (2022)




© Greene Naftali
© Frank Mullaney
© Frank Mullaney

The Disco Project Installation (2021-2022) marks the first time my work has been shown in a gallery setting, reframing a twenty-five-year-old dance for a new era in a new arena. I made The Disco Project in 1995; it premiered at New York’s PS122 and was performed only 15 times. The installation I created for Greene Naftali, and adapted for White Columns, reimagines the dance in the context of an art exhibition, augmenting video documentation of a 1997 performance with two additional projections: the first is a time stamp that counts down the work’s nearly 44-minute run, helping to situate the viewer and gesturing toward the real-time contingencies of live performance; and the second is a first-person text I wrote for each installation that reflects on the circumstances of the current show.

Using short, declarative sentences that mirror the style of the text projected behind the dancers in the original work, the new text recalls the conditions under which The Disco Project was made and points to the different economies and modes of spectatorship that distinguish dance from visual art. The Disco Project Installation offers my response to the problem of how to preserve and display dance in the visual art world.

The Disco Project (1995) follows Not-About-AIDS-Dance (1994) in the progression of my work, both employing projected text that provides nonfictional information about the lives of the performers. Created in the 1990s, AIDS played an inescapable role in the text of both works. Fast forward to 2021 and COVID-19, which from the beginning has reverberated for me with the AIDS crisis; considering these ongoing pandemics together raises comparisons between the reception with which each has been met (for instance: no Operation Warp Speed for an HIV vaccine, still).

The Disco Project Installation (2021-2022)
3-channel video
1 hour, looped; dimensions variable.

From Disco To Disco, Greene Naftali, 2021
February 2-27, 2021
Looking Back / The 12th White Columns Annual - Selected by Mary Manning, 2022
January 22-March 5, 2022



The Disco Project
premiered at Performance Space 122, December 14-17, 1995.
Choreography and Text: Neil Greenberg
Lighting Design: Michael Stiller
Musical Advisor: Zeena Parkins
Performed by: Ellen Barnaby, Christopher Batenhorst, Neil Greenberg, Justine Lynch, Paige Martin

Video documentation produced by the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library
Recorded by Sathya Production Services, Molly McBride, Director at the Joyce Theater, January 17, 1997
Viewing Link



Webinar on the Installation:
Neil Greenberg, Carol Greene, Sarah Michelson: The Disco Project Installation
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