“Gustave Le Gray No. 1”
In 2019, Ballet Across America was put together with the inspiration of women’s leadership in ballet and dance. To mark the celebration, the Center commissioned choreographer Pam Tanowitz to create a world premiere work for the week’s two participating companies, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Miami City Ballet; both are companies led by visionary women – Virginia Johnson at DTH and Lourdes Lopez in Miami.
Tanowitz set the work on two dancers from each company, with a pianist on stage playing a solo work by the composer Caroline Shaw. The piece had its world premiere during Ballet Across America on May 31, 2019. This video captures the premiere performance.
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Pianist: Sylvia Jung
Dancers: Renan Cerdeiro, Lauren Fadeley, Anthony Santos and Stephanie Rae Williams

Cunningham Clip -Summerspace
CUNNINGHAM is a 3D cinematic experience about the legendary American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, orchestrated through his iconic works and performed by the last generation of his dancers. This poetic film traces Merce’s artistic evolution over three decades of risk and discovery (1944–1972), from his early years as a struggling dancer in postwar New York to his emergence as one of the most visionary and influential choreographers worldwide. 3D technology weaves together Merce’s philosophies and stories, creating a visceral journey through the choreographer’s world.

中谷芙二子

fog sculptures
ok-offenens kulturhaus linz

In 1970 Nakaya created her first fog sculpture when commissioned by the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) to make a work for the Pepsi Pavillion of the Osaka World Exposition. In creating a work of white mist enclosing the building, Nakaya became the first artist to have used fog as a sculptural medium. E.A.T is an organisation devoted to facilitating working relationships between artists and engineers. Nakaya worked with American engineer Thomas Mee to create the fog for her Osaka commission, the technique for which she has continued to use, with minor moderations, for her subsequent fog sculptures since.Whilst Nakaya has also worked in film and video, it is her use of fog for which she is best known. Nakaya has used pure-water fog to create installations, performances, stage-sets and environmental park designs, often collaborating with other artists or with performers, choreographers and composers. Nakaya’s interest in fog has developed from its relation to our visual sense. In a thick fog we become disorientated, frustrated at our inability to see. In this way, Nakaya’s sculptures activate our other senses, to compensate for our loss of sight.

PLEXUS
Aurélien Bory is a Toulouse-based choreographer working at the intersection of dance, circus and visual art. In Plexus, he encloses the Japanese dancer Kaori Ito in a forest of tensioned vertical cables. It’s as if she’s in a transparent cuboid cage. We can see her, but her image is blurred by the shimmer of Arno Veyrat’s lighting as it moves across the cables. Ito strains against these confines, writhing, flailing and hurling herself against the cables. Every sound is hugely amplified, so with her every movement we are assailed by a high-tensile jangling and groaning. At intervals she subjects her environment to furious challenge, racing backwards and forwards within the limited inner space so that the cage rocks on its axis. At other times she positions herself between the cables so that they bear her weight, and hangs there like an exhausted insect, faintly articulating her limbs.

ROSA
A short film based on the work of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker to Bartók music
Rosa (1992 ; ca. 16 min., b&w ; letterboxed format) / La Monnaie/De Munt & Rosas ; based on a choreography by Anpeter-greenaway-and-anne-teresa-de-keersmaekerne Teresa de Keersmaeker in collaboration with Jean-Luc Ducourt ; with Fumiyo Ikeda, Nordine Benchorf ; directed by Peter Greenaway ; a production of Entropie

discrete figures 2019

Human performers meet computer-generated bodies, calculated visualisations of movement meet flitting drones! Artificial intelligence and self-learning machines make this previously unseen palette of movement designs appear, designs that far transcend the boundaries of human articulateness, allowing for a deep glimpse into the abstract world of data processing. The Rhizomatiks Research team, led by Japanese artist, programmer, interaction designer and DJ Daito Manabe, gathers collective power with a number of experts, among them the five ELEVENPLAY dancers of choreographer MIKIKO as well as from coding artist Kyle McDonald. The result is a breathtaking, implemented beautifully, in short: visually stunning.

Play
Invited to the Palais Garnier for the first time, the choreographer Alexander Ekman lived a dream: working with the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet! In order to plunge them into the universe of his piece, he invited them to play. After all, isn’t dance also entertainment, amusement, practice, exercise and manipulation? Here, play is everything and everywhere. From the props to the sets. For, as the choreographer repeats, play makes us happy; one should never stop being a child. In the Massenet and Blanchine studios, photographer Anne Deniau focusses on certain emblematic props from this production, whilst playwright Nicolas Doutey reflects upon these new visual compositions.

White Water and Dust
Set to the piano scores by Erik Satie and other composers, White Water is a lyrical dance of pure movement that flows beautifully as its title suggests. The curtain opens to a projected colour image of a flowing river; it slowly transforms into black and white. In serenity and in turbulence, whiteness of waves and ripples streams out of the blackness. Green netting and girds used for digital design interrupt the flow of water, thus revealing the process of creating virtual images and illusion of light, providing a pleasant surprise to the dance.
Cloud Gate
Cloud Gate is the name of the oldest known dance in China. In 1973, choreographer Lin Hwai-min adopted this classical name for the first contemporary dance company in the greater Chinese-speaking community.

アンヌ·テレサ·ドゥ·ケースマイケル
АННЫ ТЕРЕЗЫ ДЕ КЕЕРСМАКЕР
Drumming Live
In 1998, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker created “Drumming” for the dancers of her company “Rosas”. This intense and jubilant piece is set to haunting music by Steve Reich, a pioneer of minimalist music. On stage, nine dancers perform an exhausting choreography with swirling rhythms that reveal a deep and vital energy. Today, almost twenty years later, it is the turn of the Paris Opera Ballet’s dancers to adopt it. For the occasion, the choreographer talks to us about this extreme piece.

Tabula Rasa
Ohad Naharin
Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa
photo Gadi Dagon
Hailed as one of the world’s preeminent contemporary choreographers, Ohad Naharin assumed the role of Artistic Director in 1990, and propelled the company into a new era with his adventurous curatorial vision and distinctive choreographic voice. Naharin is also the originator of the innovative movement language, Gaga, which has enriched his extraordinary movement invention, revolutionized the company’s training, and emerged as a growing international force in the larger field of movement practices for both dancers and non-dancers.

Self Unfinished

French choreographer Xavier Le Roy defies categorisation as a dance-maker, drawing on diverse influences from the worlds of science, performance art and contemporary dance.
In Self Unfinished (1998), Le Roy takes the audience on a journey of metamorphosis as he transforms into an extraordinary hybrid creature part machine, part alien, part human.
Employing all manner of physical devices, Le Roy creates a world of illusion that is as unsettling as it is transfixing.

Circles II
Doris Chase has achieved international stature as a pioneer in the field of video art since she moved from Seattle to New York City in 1972. An artist of remarkable and continuous creativity, Chase now divides her time between her video headquarters in New York and a Seattle studio where she works on new projects in painting and sculpture.Beginning as an innovative painter and sculptor in Seattle in the 1950s, Chase created sculpture that was meant to be touched and manipulated by the viewer. Chase then developed large-scale kinetic sculptures in collaboration with choreographers, and her art was set in motion by dancers. In New York, her majors contribution to the evolution of artists’ video has been her work in videodance. On videotape, dancers and sculpture evolve into luminous abstract forms which represent some of the most sophisticated employments of video technology by an artist of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Chase began working in the nascent genre of video theater. In these productions, she uses the imtimacy of the video screen to achieve a new synthesis of visual and dramatic art. Her video theatre compositions present multicultural and social commentary, utilizing scripts by writers such as Lee Breuer, Thulani Davis, and Jessica Hagedorn in the “Concepts” series. Collaborating with actresses Geralding Page, Ann Jackson, Roberta Wallach, Joan Plowright, and Luise Riner in the “By Herself” series, she focuses on the viewpoints and experiences of older women. Today, coming full circle, Doris Chase in Seattle is exploring a renewed interest in painting and sculpture as well as in the modernist aesthetic she never really ceased pursuing, even during her most adventuresome multimedia years.