Everybody Dance Now: 20 Years of Dancing in Print

Opening today at the AIGA National Design Center, Everybody Dance Now: 20 Years of Dancing in Print is a retrospective of Dance Ink (1989-1996) and 2wice (1997-ongoing), the pioneering performing and visual arts magazines published by Patsy Tarr and designed and art directed by Abbott Miller.

Emerging from the New York dance community, Dance Ink was conceived as an alternative performance space, one that had the advantage of becoming a physical record of this most ephemeral art form. 2wice, its successor, continues in this tradition with a focus on editions that use the medium of print to evoke the tactile, visual and temporal qualities of performance.

Everybody Dance Now focuses on 2wice’s collaborations with a distinguished roster of performers and photographers, the result of a single, powerful idea of creating performances within the unique “stage” of the printed page. The exhibition, designed by Miller, includes the publications, books, photographs, posters and artifacts related to the production of these unique documents of contemporary dance.

The exhibition will be open to the public from April 3 through May 15 at the AIGA National Design Center, 164 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 11 am to 6 pm; Friday, 11 am to 5 pm.

A look back at Dance Ink and 2wice after the jump.

As a supporter of dance who has helped choreographers create and stage their work, Patsy Tarr has sought to create a physical record of ephemeral performance. She founded Dance Ink in 1989, working with editor Lise Friedman and photography editor Kate Schlesinger. The magazine featured essays on dance, photography, film, and fashion as well as commissioned photographs. The quarterly gained notoriety for its design when Abbott Miller became art director and the magazine embraced a new large-format presentation that created a more dramatic context for photography. The eccentric and exuberant aesthetic of the magazine was recognized with many awards and is now a time capsule of performance and downtown culture in New York City.

In 1997 Tarr followed Dance Ink with 2wice, a new publishing venture that connects performing and visual arts, with Miller as both art director and editor. Moving from a quarterly to a bi-annual, 2wice is built around specific themes that are explored through essays and performances conceived specifically for the page. These performances are sometimes based on an existing piece of choreography while others are developed uniquely for 2wice. Miller’s art direction on 2wice has been recognized and admired for its tactility and its integration of graphics, photography, and text.