“Restagings No. 2: Of Serra (to movement)” begins at the moment of precarious balance enacted by Richard Serra’s “Prop” pieces. The performance makes a substitution of materials, replacing Serra’s steel forms with human bodies. Dancers perform looping solos and duets, using Serra’s sculptures as choreographic scores. The dancers’ movement is recorded on graphite panels mounted on the walls, each panel accumulating eight hours of movement. Paula Matthusen’s sound design highlights the performance’s departure from static sculpture, measuring and reflecting changes in position via radio transmitters worn by the dancers.

“Of Serra” is the second work in Restagings, a multi-work series that reads visual artworks as scores for performance. Restagings work from an iconic cadre of 1960s artists—Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Walter de Maria—all of whom were closely associated with dance and performance artists of their era—Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Carolee Schneemann among them. Restagings mine the choreographic logic and somatic ideas built into visual art works, unearthing bodies and labor implicit in objects, drawings, and texts and incorporating them into our experience of the original works.