Contract and Release / Still Release, a performance by Brendan Fernandes

Artist Brendan Fernandes will present a new iteration of Contract and Release, a durational performance exploring discipline, balance, resistance, and the possibility of finding freedom within constraint.

The body of work first developed for the Noguchi Museum in 2019, taking its title from Martha Graham’s foundational technique of contraction and release, the work considers how bodies negotiate discipline, balance, labor, resistance, and care. Fernandes, a former dancer trained in ballet and Martha Graham techniques, returns to movement vocabularies embedded within his own muscle memory, asking how the trained body might find agency and freedom within structures of constraint.

At the center of the performance are two sculptural rocking chairs from Fernandes’s Still Release series. These “body-devices” draw directly from Isamu Noguchi’s collaboration with Martha Graham and, specifically, the non-rocking rocking chair Noguchi designed for Graham’s Appalachian Spring (1944). In Still Release, Fernandes transforms Noguchi’s static stage object into an unstable, functional rocking form. The sculptures become both partners and obstacles: supporting the dancers while requiring them to continually negotiate balance, gravity, stillness, and movement.

The work unfolds through a series of shifting relationships: a duet between two dancers becomes a duet between body and chair, before expanding into an ensemble in which dancers and sculptures move with, against, and in response to one another. At its core, the work is about tension; the tension between control and instability, discipline and release, and the possibility of finding freedom within constraint.

The choreography draws from Graham’s technique of muscular contraction and release. As the dancers attempt to find stillness on the unstable chairs, stillness itself becomes an act of sustained physical labor. Muscles contract, release, adjust, and respond; balance is continually achieved only to become precarious again. Here, freedom is found not through the absence of restraint, but through moving within and against it. This laborious pursuit of stillness becomes a form of resistance, asking how the body can negotiate the structures that support, discipline, and contain it.

Through repetition, endurance, stillness, and instability, bodies and objects continually renegotiate their relationships. Sculpture becomes choreographic; the body becomes sculptural; and movement becomes a way of rehearsing freedom within constraint.

Presented within the gallery over the course of one hour, the work unfolds as a durational encounter rather than a conventional seated performance. There is no fixed beginning or privileged viewing position. Audiences are invited to enter and leave throughout the performance hours, experiencing the work for a few minutes or remaining for its full duration.

This event is presented as part of the current gallery exhibition Never The Same River on view through December 5.

Image Courtesy of the Artist and Monique Meloche Gallery.
Photo Sara Luckey.

About the Artist

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya, lives and works in Chicago, IL) is an internationally recognized artist working at the intersection of dance and visual art. His work explores issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in Toronto, Canada, Fernandes seeks to create new spaces and forms of agency through hybrid forms: works that are part ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest, and always rooted in collaboration and the fostering of solidarity. 

His work across installation, video, sculpture, and dance have been presented at the 2019 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Denver, CO), the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), Prospect.6 (New Orleans, LA), among many others. 

Fernandes is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Robert Rauschenberg Residency Fellowship (2014), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020), an Artadia Award (2019), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2019), and the Walder Foundation’s Platform Award (2024). Most recently, Arts Alliance Illinois also honored him with the Creative Voice Award in 2024.

Fernandes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. He serves on the boards of the Joffrey Ballet and Arts Alliance Illinois. Fernandes is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York.