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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Alvaro Barrington, Garvey: Sex Love Nurturing Famalay

Art Review

October 2019

Kevin Brazil

Art Review

October 2019

The unofficial anthem of this year’s London Carnival was ‘Famalay’, a bouyon-influenced soca song that won the Road March in Trinidad & Tobago’s Carnival...

Essay

October 2018

The Uses of Queer Art

Kevin Brazil

Essay

October 2018

In June 2018 a crowd assembled in Tate Britain to ask: ‘What does a queer museum look like?’ Surrounded...

TWO DAYS BEFORE WE WERE SCHEDULED TO MEET, Yvonne Rainer walked into the gallery I was looking after for a friend and caught me leafing through her autobiography When I met the great dancer, choreographer and film-maker in her Manhattan apartment I was too shy to ask whether or not she had noticed what I was reading I hesitated to ask because Feelings Are Facts is so sincere that it makes you feel you know Rainer intimately Her writing is as direct as her dance In the introduction to the first chapter, she approaches the reader: ‘If you’re interested in Plato, you’re reading the wrong book If you’re interested in difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that a club sandwich and other meals – including breakfast – have remained in the memory of the present writer, keep reading’   That straightforward approach is evident in the way Rainer speaks When we meet she says, ‘My syntax when I speak is not to my liking I don’t finish sentences or I interrupt them’ As I transcribed the recording of our conversation, I marvelled not only at Rainer’s honesty, but also at how exacting she is: she remembers every detail, and has a penchant for storytelling As she describes her relationships, work, ambitions and memories, I am struck by how appreciative she is of her contemporaries: Rainer studied with Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, lived with Robert Morris, danced with Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton That history comes alive whenever Rainer talks: widely credited as one of the central figures of contemporary dance, she complements accounts of her own practice by delineating that of her contemporaries We talk a lot about her early work, the focus of her recent solo exhibition at London’s Raven Row, and many of those accounts go back to the flurry of activity of the Judson Dance Theater at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s     2012 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first dance performances at Judson It was celebrated with a burst of conferences, screenings of the

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

July 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Nora Ikstena's ‘Soviet Milk’

Book Review

August 2018

Kevin Brazil

Book Review

August 2018

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena opens with two women who cannot remember. ‘I don’t remember 15 October 1969,’ says the first. ‘I don’t remember...

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Interview

October 2013

Interview with Chris Petit

Hannah Gregory

Interview

October 2013

Chris Petit likes driving. Most of his films, from his first Radio On (1979), to London Orbital (with Iain...

Art

May 2012

Art's Fading Sway: Russian Ark by Aleksandr Sokurov

Scott Esposito

Art

May 2012

I have often fallen asleep in small theatres. It is an embarrassing thing to have happen during one-man shows,...

Art

July 2012

Interview with Ben Rivers

Alice Hattrick

Art

July 2012

Ben Rivers is an artist who makes films. Two Years at Sea, his first feature-length film, was released to...

 

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