|
|
A woman clad in a long white dress is dancing on a circular sand surface in the middle of a large exhibition space to music by Steve Reich. The traces and signs which her steps are writing into the sand can be clearly followed. Her movements are picking up on the circular form, measuring the circle in the middle while her traces are forming demi- and quarter circles. Endlessly, continuously and without haste, with calm and rhythmic movements, sometimes turning around herself she finds an expression for the music, a form for her language of movement as well as for the materiality of the sand on which she dances. It is fascinating to follow her constantly repeating movements, but it is the entire picture that actually forms a poetical unity in which one aspect does not exist without the other.
Thierry De Mey has created an unusually expressive installation that could not have been realized in the same way as a stage performance. Into an arena surrounded by a circle of columns the dancer's image (Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker) is projected onto the sand which has actually been heaped up. One hears music, but the dancer appears like a weightless apparition, an ungraspable expression that leaves no traces of its movement. The entire lighting is arranged in a way that merges projection and reality, transforming dance into a multimedia event, into a new sensuous, almost intimate experience which absorbs the attention of the viewer by the concentration of light in the dark surrounding field.
Violin/Top Shot is just one impressive example for the exciting presentations of the exhibition tanzmedial, which includes installation, video, photography and film. The exhibition, organized by the SK Stiftung Kultur, presents various work series of fourteen different artists whose works focus on the fusion of dance and media.
The exhibition architecture is intelligent and pleasingly accentuated and provides the individual works the opportunity to develop both, distance and common ground. In the installations which show videos and projections an often oppressive and uncanny atmosphere evolves; the necessary semi-darkness is exhausting and repelling. A subtle atmosphere has indeed been created that combines the required technical and the essentially dance-specific conditions perfectly. And yet, the space does not appear artificially created - everything seems to interact naturally. The dove-blue walls, the room-structuring elements and the discrete lighting inspire curiosity in the viewer.
It is obvious in all presentations that dance, movement, gesture or physiognomic impulse have found a more intense and modern form through the support of the media.
The visitor moves through the presentation, invited to watch the performances. The various forms are changing, are beautifully balanced. Large projections cast onto the spacious concrete walls, presenting film sequences (Miss World by Australian artist Margie Medlin), are existing side by side with intimate videos on discrete monitor pedestals, which have picked up the movement of a dancer with congenially simple means (whenever on on on/air drawing by Peter Welz). Interactive programs are engaging the audience, and in a rather magnificent installation behind a red velvet curtain visitors can immerse themselves in the depths of animated dance scenes (La morsure -The Bite by Franco-Canadian artist Andrea Davidson).
Two well-known films by the artists Nam June Paik (Global Groove, 1973) and Rebecca Horn (Der Eintänzer, 1978) are shown alternately on a projection wall, stressing the fundamental influence that the work of these two artists (each in their own way) had on contemporary art, including dance. Fast changes and cuts as well as colors in Paik's film clips are juxtaposed with the calm, somewhat hermetic sequences by Horn. Full of suspense, the two films pick up dance elements, representing a strangely timeless as well as modern counter position against the rest of the works that are shown in this exhibition. All works have a professional and deliberate proximity to dance, and it appears as though the creators were dancers, too.
Hans Beenhakker's film Time Steps, which was specifically produced for this exhibition, is projected overly large onto an exterior wall, thematizing dance in private rooms and in the intimate atmosphere of everyday life. His contribution provides a beautiful conclusion, showing for instance a scene, in which two boys are mesmerized, watching a dance scene by Lindy Hopper from the 1920s on television…
|
|
|
|
