Need to Know: Miguel Gutierrez

Photos of Gutierrez's work by Julieta Cervantes

The latest work from artist/choreographer Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People is titled And lose the name of action, and it's being presented as part of BAM's 30th Next Wave Festival. As Gutierrez explains, the title is comes from Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquoy and according to press notes is inspired by "Jorgen Leth's film The Perfect Human, the elusive logic of dance improvisation, philosophical quandaries about the brain, and the 19th-century spiritualist movements. "I'm really trying to look at the tension that exists between dance, as this kind of form that we don't really understand," Gutierrez says. "We only have language to put to it to talk about it and to understand it, and yet as a kind of mode of perception, it exists through and beyond language."

Featuring Gutierrez, Michelle Boule, Hilary Clark, Luke George, K.J. Holmes, and Ishmael Houston-Jones, there are two more performances of And lose the name of action at BAM.

Watch a video interview and clips of Gutierrez discussing the work: