-- By Tom Phillips 
In Part One of this conversation, Laura Peterson talked about the sea-changes in her art over the years - from satire, through abstraction, to a complex vehicle for personal, emotional expression.
After years of being cast as microscopic bugs and atomic particles, Peterson and her dancers emerged as human beings in 2012, in a full-length piece called “Failure.” It addresses a universal human experience, but you’ve never seen failure quite this way. The unique touch is the scenery - a huge kite-like construction, designed to collapse during the performance.
Peterson’s style has always been demanding, punishing – pushing beyond the limits of human stamina, almost like the Wilis in "Giselle," doomed to dance forever. But unlike Wilis, we mortals have limits beyond our limits, and at some point we have to give up. In “Failure” she addresses those outer limits.
Laura Peterson is the daughter of an academic philosopher, but as an artist she is also a child of the Judson School – drawing on the ideas incubated at Judson Memorial Church in the 1960s – among them minimalism, repetition, unusual settings and collaborations with other arts, and chance combinations. In “Failure,” it all comes together. We see choreography as philosophy – a working out of the paradoxical relationships of determinism, chance, and human will. And in a satisfying twist, we can see it this summer at Judson Memorial Church. “Failure” makes its New York debut in that sacred space, June 29 through July 1.
In March we talked about the history of the work, and what may happen in its new, post-election incarnation: