Trajal Harrell

About Trajal's Work

Trajal Harrell is a choreographer and dancer bringing different dance traditions into dialogue with each other and creating speculative moments of coexistence and interaction. Harrell transforms extensive research about dance history into what he calls a “fictitious archive,” in which the geographic, temporal, or social barriers that separated dance styles, cultures, and artists are suspended in the collective imagination. In his explorations of Japanese butoh, minimalism, modern and postmodern dance, and other performance practices, he shows how bodies can express multitudes of historical possibilities and counter-histories.

Harrell’s Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at The Judson Church (2009–2017) is a series of works centered on the question of what would happen if vogue artists from the Harlem ballroom scene performed alongside the avant-garde postmodern dancers at the Judson Church performance venue in lower Manhattan in the 1960s. Vogue grew out of underground drag and ballroom competitions and was highly stylized and flamboyant, mimicking the angular arm movements, poses, and struts of runway models. The avant-garde performance style developed at Judson Church emphasized body neutrality and the movement of dance over its storytelling aspects. Across various iterations titled by size (XS, S, M, L, etc.), Harrell presents different possible answers to the original question and explores notions of the performing body, realness, and authenticity. Antigone Sr. (L) includes dancers reciting parts of the Greek tragedy, a parody of a runway show, and a dance party. Small (S) features Harrell showing twenty different looks of his own design, ranging from “West Coast Preppy Schoolboy” to “Serving Superhero,” in a meditation on the ways we camouflage the self. Harrell has also explored hypothetical intersections with the Japanese dance form butoh, which is characterized by snail-paced, hypercontrolled gestures. His 2022 work, Deathbed, resulted from his research on butoh and its cofounder, Tatsumi Hijikata. Part installation and part performance, Deathbed speculates on the cross-influences that could have resulted if Hijikata encountered the Black choreographer and dancer Katherine Dunham while she toured Japan in 1957. It serves as both an elegy to a complex past and a celebration of how cultural exchange can affect artistic expression.

Harrell combines theater, dance, fashion, and visual art in Monkey Off My Back or the Cat’s Meow (2025). Dancers strut along a runway decorated in the style of Mondrian grid paintings while performing quotidian gestures that reference history and pop culture, a Greek folk dance, and a butoh-inspired solo. The work expresses themes of freedom, vulnerability, and the human need for community. In recontextualizing historical and cultural encounters, Harrell is reinterpreting the history of dance and reenvisioning its future.