Gwen Welliver: Double Feature

DOUBLE FEATURE
by Gwen Welliver
ISBN: 979-8992283983
$25
106 pages, full color
7.5x9.75 inches
November 2026

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-SALE NOW!

Double Feature is a dance for the page juxtaposing images from two key periods of choreographer Gwen Welliver’s artistic practice: 2013-2023 and 1991-2012. The doubled/overlapping structure of the volume creates a choreographic space in which lines, shapes, gestures, and expressions chime across time and distance. Readers, turning and reorienting, paging and paging back, become dancers of a mutable choreography about research and influence, the layered structure of memory and grief, and the myriad ways abstraction’s architectures can hold the personal, the particular, the idiosyncrasies of the body itself.

PRAISE

Time elapsed, time folded. Your perspective shifts as perspectives must. Stranger faces become familiar. But listen (look): There are patterns everywhere. "I wanted to include what we know about the contours and outlines of the body and the stories that come from that"—and—"this is a field where you can record information that is not contained by any other field." Two definitions of dance, offered within a book; two sets of instructions for a watcher (collaborator), who is also a reader (performer). This gesture, that intent. The heart in breaking unwittingly readies itself to receive new information. The heart in breaking halves itself, thereby doubling.
—Claudia LaRocco

CONTRIBUTORS

Gwen Welliver is a choreographer, teacher, and movement director based in New York City. She is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Sustained Achievement in Dancing, for her work with Doug Varone and Dancers. Welliver previously served as the Rehearsal Director of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, where she led the revival of early works, opera restaging, and the supervision of the company’s international touring repertory. Her teaching has taken her to academic programs, conservatories, cultural centers, and festivals across four continents. Welliver’s current research explores open-ended approaches to dance, including performing simultaneity, emotional tenor through nonfigurative drawing, and collaborative practices. She is a Professor in the School of Dance at Florida State University.