"Radical Accounting" Visualizations featured at Whitney Museum
Ohio State Associate Professor of Dance Harmony Bench and collaborator Kate Elswit, Professor of Performance and Technology at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London), were commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art to produce the Radical Accounting series of historical dance data visualizations as part of the Edges of Ailey exhibition, which opened in September 2024 and will run through February 2025.
Alvin Ailey was a forward-facing visionary and one of the most significant choreographers of the 20th century. Curated by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney, Edges of Ailey is the first large-scale museum exhibition to celebrate Ailey’s life, dances, influences, and enduring legacy. The dynamic showcase features works by more than eighty artists, a multi-screen video installation, an ambitious suite of performances, and revelatory archival materials.
Created with core project team members Antonio Jiménez-Mavillard (Moving Data) and Tia-Monique Uzor (Central), Radical Accounting: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Data as a Framework for Historical Imagination consists of three time-based animations that play on a loop across three 75” screens.
The series transforms archival materials to visualize the interconnections of time, space, and bodies across the history of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). They show how AAADT grew from a small touring company to a global phenomenon, charting the impact of Ailey not only as a choreographer but someone who shared a living history of dance with audiences around the world. In doing so, the series traces embodied knowledge across generations of dancers. The underlying datasets were composed over three years from more than 30,000 documents located in archives across the United States. Ohio State doctoral students in Dance Studies, Amy Schofield and Alyssa Stover, assisted in collecting and processing some of this data. Radical Accounting brings each dancer, performance venue, and choreography into view, foregrounding how dance histories are collective and interdependent.
AAADT Company Membership Flow by Season, 1958-2023. See explanation below.
For example, the above stream graph is a still image taken from the Radical Accounting animation “Generations of Embodied Knowledge: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Dance Artists, 1958-2023,” which tracks the comings and goings of all performers and artistic leadership through AAADT since its inception. Each stream represents an artist’s trajectory, growing taller with the duration of their membership. Years as dancers are depicted in blue; leadership roles, including rehearsal directors, in purple; and artistic and associate artistic directors in magenta. The shading of each artist’s stream is set by the first season that they were employed by the company, from dark to light. Cumulatively, the number of dance artists and their individual tenures with the company determine the height of the graph for a given season.
The Observer describes Radical Accounting’s presence in Edges of Ailey as “an unexpected delight. [...] The animations are fascinating, quite beautiful, and worth a visit.”
The Radical Accounting series is supported by a commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art, under the direction of Adrienne Edwards. Further support has been provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the fellowship Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data (AHRC, ref: AH/W005034/1); by the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama’s Impact Acceleration Account (AHRC) and Knowledge Exchange funding schemes; and by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme at The Ohio State University.
Radical Accounting builds on ten years of collaboration exploring the questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for dance historical inquiry, in particular the model that Elswit and Bench established in the award-winning AHRC-funded project Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (AHRC AH/R012989/1).
Speaking of their work on Radical Accounting, Kate and Harmony said: “For a long time, we have been making the claim that data-engaged approaches can change how the public understands dance history. This commission for Edges of Ailey challenged us to realize that promise. We are so grateful to curator Adrienne Edwards for her vision in creating a place for this work at the Whitney.”
Find out more about the Edges of Ailey exhibition and book tickets by visiting the website of the Whitney Museum of American Art: Edges of Ailey | Whitney Museum of American Art