Dancing About Architecture
…is like writing about music: of course it can be done!
And done amazingly well, if you’re Frédéric Flamand, a Belgian choreographer, who collaborated with Zaha Hadid, an architect who incorporates movement into her structures.
"… Mr. Flamand, 60, approached Ms. Hadid, 56, in 1999 after admiring her kinetic designs. “Zaha’s architecture is based on movement,” he said in a recent phone interview from London. “She creates a very fluid space and continuous transformation. We wanted to make the dancers dance, of course, but to make the space dance too.”""
Whole article here. I’ve been a part of site-specific dances before, and they’re a lot of fun and can be transcendent experiences, far beyond anything done in a traditional proscenium space. The problem is always, where do you put the audience? I think, in fact, one of the advantages that dance for the camera gives a person is the ability to more concretely focus the audience’s gaze where you want it.
This, however, is different; they’re creating dance-specific sites. And oh, how I wish I thought we could devote enough resources to the world of dance to do this more often!
2 Comments
I LOVE site specific dance performances!
I wrote about one fantastic one in the abandoned subways of old Los Angeles. You can read about it on my blog: http://tangocherie.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html
I haven’t every really been exposed to site-specific dance. My experience has just required me to adapt my dancing to a variety of environments. It’s incredible how much creativity there is in the world!