How did you become the editor-in-chief of the Journal? What did you want to change about it?
After the issue “Improvisation Is Dead; Long Live Improvisation” came out, I went to a community meeting and everyone was talking in a very esoteric way about the Journal and improvisation. It was very heated, and I said, “We could talk about this all day, but one of the real questions is, how are we going to deal with the larger culture?” Everyone was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! You should do the next Journal—that would be a great topic!” But instead of focusing on that as a theme, I thought we should use it as the structure of the Journal itself.

Because no comparable dance publication exists?
Yes. The Journal basically featured a kind of diaristic writing—it was more about artists writing than it was articles about this experimental dance field. So there was an idea: What if we tried to give more visibility to contemporary dance? One of the magazines that we based some of this on is called Avalanche, from the ’70s. Basically, it would have bold faces of artists—from Yvonne Rainer to Robert Smithson and Vito Acconci—on the cover and they would take over the magazine and do their own thing. We don’t do that, but it was a key model.

The new format does feature an artist on the cover. Why did you choose Meg Stuart for the current issue?
I think there’s all this mythology around Meg, and I wanted to humanize and demythologize a lot of that. I had worked with her—she was a kind of mentor to me in the summer of 2005 at Tanz im August. I got to know her, and I realized there were all these ideas about how Meg became this big star in Europe. I found her to be incredibly generous as a person, artist and teacher in ways that I couldn’t have expected. I want to place her within her history of having been in New York, having left and now bringing her work back. Whether you like her work or not is not the point: For a long time, she symbolized something in this community even though she wasn’t here.

Why spotlight an artist at all?
We talked a lot about this idea in terms of visibility; in many ways, it’s anti to what Movement Research is about. But I feel that some of these artists have achieved a lot, and there’s no place that consolidates a body of information about them and puts that out in the larger culture. I felt there was a real need, and maybe it’s only a temporal need. Hopefully it’s seen as an honor.

Movement Research Performance Journal No. 32 is out now.