Some sweet day, a three-week program presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the fall of 2012, featured six dance performances by contemporary choreographers, as well as interstitial installations and lively discussion sessions. (Select performances and the three response sessions streamed live on MoMA’s website. Archival videos of the performances will be made available online at a future date.) Presented in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, a challenging gallery site, the programming for Some sweet day prompted questions often triggered by performance exhibitions: How should dancers, actors, or musicians navigate the shift from black-box theaters to white-cube galleries? Can mobile museum spectators also assume the role of a stationary audience? How might these events be documented, disseminated, re-presented?

These queries (among others), however vexing or invigorating, tend to surface whenever art museums—typically tasked with the preservation and display of objects—present live events. They certainly must have been on the mind of choreographer and dancer Ralph Lemon, who co-organized the exhibition with MoMA PS1 associate curator Jenny Schlenzka and producer Jill A. Samuels. In an update on the familiar artist-cum-curator tradition, in which an outsider’s perspective offers visitors a fresh take on overlooked permanent collection gems, MoMA associate director Kathy Halbreich asked Lemon to build an exhibition not from items in MoMA’s storage facilities but rather from his own discipline.

The curators divided six well-known choreographers into three pairings. Steve Paxton and Jérôme Bel’s dances ushered in the first week, followed by Faustin Linyekula and Dean Moss’s contributions. For the third and final week Deborah Hay and Sarah Michelson filled the atrium and the surrounding area with their choreographies. These artists came of age in different eras, geographic locations, and cultural contexts, and were selected precisely because of their diverse perspectives. Indeed, the curatorial goals for Some sweet day, as the press materials and weekly responses indicated, were to foster connections across categorizations, to address intergenerational influences, and to consider race and gender through movement. The exhibition also aimed to explore how choreography can activate or alter a physical location like the atrium, one traditionally inhabited by essentially static paintings and sculptures.

While topics as far-reaching as the impact of dance-historical legacies and identity politics underwent mostly cursory examination during the three-week series, how these choreographers engaged with their physical surroundings—and with the viewers who shared the space—proved a much more compelling line of inquiry, not least because of the challenges the notoriously cavernous and acoustically difficult atrium presents to its inhabitants. Indeed, one of Lemon’s three key organizing guideposts asked each participant to consider how dance can be made for or function within it. A second instruction was to think about dialogues generated by the weekly pairings. (The exhibition’s title, Some sweet day, refers to the lyrics of a gospel hymn, and hints at an unpublicized third curatorial premise. More on that to come.)

The exhibition’s first week featured restaged choreographies by Paxton and Bel. Paxton was a founding member of the influential Judson Dance Theater, whose participants rejected modern dance’s expressivity and championed democratic choreographic modes. For Satisfyin Lover (first shown in 1967) he gathered forty-one variously abled non-dancers to perform basic, pedestrian actions. Entering and exiting through the sliding doors partitioning the atrium from the contemporary galleries, Paxton’s dancers traversed the “stage” (demarcated from the audience’s space with white tape), stood still, or briefly sat in one of three chairs. The same untrained dancers formed a loose huddle for State (1968) and either held their positions or shifted as a group for the work’s nine-minute duration. Paxton’s works from the 1960s retain their disarming simplicity because they continue to upend accepted dance theatrical roles: the performers sought stillness in State, while the viewers—no different in appearance or technical skill from those on stage—squirmed, shifted, photographed, and murmured.

In breaking from modern dance, Judson’s anti-virtuosic, everyday style greatly influenced subsequent choreographers. It is no coincidence, then, that Lemon invited Bel to enact segments of The Show Must Go On (2001), a work with conceptual ties to Judson precursors. Bel’s dance required twenty dancers, evenly split between professionals and amateurs, to execute steps ranging from hip-cocked stillness, to grotesque gestures, to social dancing. With movement set to, or derived from, American pop music, the segments commenced when the Beatles’s “Come Together” signaled that the participants should gather and face the audience. The piece turned playful when all of the female dancers, plus one male, slowly executed ballet positions to the accompaniment of Lionel Ritchie’s “Ballerina Girl,” then switched to grating when the entire cast performed the Macarena.

Humorous and accessible, The Show Must Go On was a clear crowd pleaser. Yet during the response session that followed, while the floor was, as chief curator and discussion moderator Sabine Breitwieser proposed, “still hot,” Bel did not withhold his reservations regarding how a work specifically developed for a theater context might prove less successful in a gallery. (All quotations from author notes taken during the scheduled response sessions.) Would stanchions used to protect paintings and sculptures effectively serve to demarcate a stage? Would audience members remain for the entire dance or come and go? A laconic Paxton offered a counterpoint to Bel’s verbose trepidation, claiming (perhaps as a blow to curatorial ego) that working in the atrium was no different than the Salt Lake City ballroom in which he first staged Satisfyin Lover.

In contrast, the choreographers slated for the second week were explicitly engaged with the museum’s architecture and cultural legacies. Linyekula developed a new work, What Is Black Music Anyway . . . / Self-Portraits, with Congolese guitarist and composer Flamme Kapaya and South African singer Hlengiwe Lushaba. Linyekula’s elastic limbs quivered and shivered as he deftly explored the stage space, now a low, white platform placed in the center of the atrium. Whether crouching or in rapid motion, his dancing was infused with the amplified guitar and emotive vocalizations. While Lushaba repeatedly sang the lyrics, “Take me to the Congo River where my heart lies,” Linyekula investigated the place non-Western music and dance might occupy within MoMA as a stronghold of European and American Modernism and Postmodernism.

Cultural histories were also central to Voluntaries, choreographed by Moss, with artist Laylah Ali collaborating as dance dramaturge. Developed for four dancers including Dean, Voluntaries—the most theatrical work in the exhibition—examines the legacy of the white abolitionist John Brown. Moss engaged a costume designer, constructed props, and incorporated a recorded interview with his father, Harold G. Moss, the first African American mayor of Tacoma, Washington. The dancers’ movements were alternatively balletic and aggressive. In one affecting segment the female dancers stood atop white platforms at either end of the stage and hurled mirrored Mylar boards at their male counterparts who then scrambled to gather up the reflective surfaces bouncing off their bodies.

Both artists struggled while making dances for the atrium. During the response session Linyekula admitted feeling challenged by how to be in the space both physically and symbolically; as he poignantly noted, he is an African artist showing work in an institution that has historically displayed objects from his continent under the “primitivist” rubric. Moss, for his part, referred to the space as a “monster,” yet he was able to productively overcome his foe after inviting high school-age members of the MoMA Teens programs to participate in his process. The students aided in prop construction, and in the final moments of Voluntaries, they dropped small reflective Mylar “leaves” from the sixth-floor balcony. This thoughtful solution not only answered Lemon’s call for intergenerational dialogue but also allowed Moss to maximize use of the atrium’s towering verticality.

Of all the works included in Some sweet day, Kevin Beasley’s one-hour performance, I Want My Spot Back, most productively integrated sound with bodies either in motion or stilled. Crouched behind turntables and a laptop, the artist mixed various textures with slowed-down vocal tracks of deceased 1990s-era hip-hop artists. Beasley maintained steady bodily control, barely shifting his weight throughout the set. Meanwhile visitors moved freely through the atrium space as they shared the stage with the artist in positions of repose, pressed against the surrounding walls to feel the architectural vibrations, or walked out of the atrium and into adjacent gallery spaces to experience how the sound reverberated. I Want My Spot Back was the second of two interstitial works included (presumably) for the sake of accidental audiences—those who visited the museum on days with no scheduled dance performances. (The other, a video excerpted from Paxton’s instructional DVD called Weight of Sensation, was projected on the ceiling to much lesser effect.) Although Beasley is primarily a sculptor and not a choreographer, there was no reason not to experience his consuming performance as dance.

The third and final week’s pairing of female choreographers Hay and Michelson mirrored the intergenerational set-up of week one. However, unlike Paxton and Bel’s shared affinity for ordinary bodies and everyday movements, Michelson’s Devotion Study #3 did not promote dialogue with Hay; rather, it enacted direct conversation between choreographer, dancer, and, to a lesser extent, the physical space. Indeed, the sheer amount of atrium square footage Michelson claimed for her dance underscored the minor role the tightly squeezed audience played.

Dancer Nicole Mannarino signaled the start of Devotion Study #3 when she charged through the lobby, skipped up the stairs, and appeared on the atrium floor. She arrived hand-in-hand with two museum security guards who stood statue-like at the entryway throughout the performance, gently ushering passersby out of the viewers’ sightlines. (Michelson, like Moss, engaged with the people who make the institution run. And guards, of course, perform a kind of choreography in the galleries every day.) With her hands clasped behind her back, the short-shorts-wearing Mannarino performed exacting steps, high kicks, and emitted occasional piercing, echoing screams that Michelson, positioned at the stage’s edge, echoed again. The choreographer swayed in time to a low-volume soul music soundtrack, and focused her attention so firmly on her primary dancer that when a second, James Tyson, appeared briefly, his fleeting presence was merely that. Nothing seemed capable of disrupting either the captivating, deftly executed choreography or the strong tie between Michelson and Mannarino.

If the first week’s pairing ostensibly considered generations and the second focused on issues of race, then week three was tasked with addressing gender. Yet why should Paxton and Bel’s dances signal shared choreographic modes rather than their shared whiteness? Likewise, Linyekula’s movements seemed secondary to his female collaborator’s vocal prowess, and Michelson’s investment in the choreographer-dancer relationship was not explicitly gendered. Ultimately, Hay’s structured improvisation, Blues, which dealt the most overtly with racial issues, forced the revealing of the third, unpublicized curatorial premise. In addition to encouraging his participants to engage with the atrium and each other, Lemon prompted them to think about race using the broad question: What is black music?

Hay has produced radical, experimental dances for decades; she, like Paxton, was a Judson dance participant in the 1960s. For Blues, Hay devised a work that required two separate casts: a group of white, female dancers dubbed the “blue whites,” and a corresponding number of black dancers, or “blue blacks.” She developed the work remotely (the dancers live in New York; Hay lives in Texas), and gave each cast separate instructions. The “blue whites” practiced quietude; the “blue blacks” learned short song lyrics written by Hay and worked through the elusive query: “What if we are served by everything we see?” The “blue whites,” clad in black leotards and tights, stood calmly, primarily facing each other in a circle. The “blue blacks,” on the other hand, exercised sartorial and motile freedom. Whether costumed in brightly colored spandex, street clothes, or party dresses, the dancers moved openly through the atrium, around the other cast, and among the spectators.

The racially divided structure for Blues felt simplistic. Not all of the dancers identified as “white” or “black,” and for reasons unexplained, the “blue whites” were equated with young, lithe, femaleness, while the “blue blacks” encompassed male, female, and transgendered dancers. Hay’s controversial premise overshadowed the performance’s great strength: In stark contrast to the rest of the choreographers, Hay did not create a demarcated stage for her dancers. The audience initially gathered around the “blue whites,” but as the “blue blacks” emerged from the crowd and began to move, so too did the viewers—through the atrium, around the dancers, and among each other.

MoMA’s staging of Some sweet day coincides with a recent outpouring of interest in dance among visual art practitioners and institutions. The spate of museum exhibitions that have taken up intersections of art and dance, including Move: Choreographing You (Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, 2010–11), Dance/Draw (ICA Boston, 2011–12), and Danser Sa Vie (Centre Pompidou, 2011–12), among others, suggest that moving bodies have staked a claim as productive material. Choreographies can make visual art and dance audiences alike rethink the limits of the very containers in which performances are presented. The process can be messy, to be sure, but as Linyekula so aptly noted, “Even in a white box there is rubble.”