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BANDALOOP

100 Northern Ave
You’ve probably never seen anything like this before. Six members of the vertical dance troupe BANDALOOP descended the façade of the new 100 Northern Ave. building commemorating its grand opening at Boston’s Seaport District. The performers are held securely by special rigging allowing them to mesmerize audiences with dynamic physicality and intricate choreography. BANDALOOP honors nature, community, and the human spirit through perspective-bending dance. A pioneer in vertical performance, BANDALOOP seamlessly weaves dynamic physicality, intricate choreography and climbing technology to turn the dance floor on its side. Under the artistic direction of Amelia Rudolph, the work re-imagines dance, activates public spaces, and inspires wonder and imagination in audiences around the world.

AURÉLIEN BORY

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.

Malin Bülow

马林·比洛
マリンビューロー
말린 블로우
Μαλίν Μπάλοου
Elastic Bonding
This vertical version of Elastic Bonding was made site specifically for the Project Space at Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder in Trondheim. It was shown as part of Multiplié dance festival, an annual festival of contemporary dance in Norway. The project was a collaboration between Babel visningsrom and DansiT.

Jonathan Monaghan

Scroll
Scroll is a seamlessly looping video installation depicting an endless vertical column of cryptic technological contraptions, architecture, fur, and fabric. The unsettling ambiguity of the forms and the discordance between artificial and natural materials confronts the ever-blurring border between technology and the organic.

Merce Cunningham

简宁汉
מרס קנינגהם
マース·カニングハム
머시 디스 커닝햄
МЕРС КАННИНГЕМ
« Scenario » de Merce Cunningham
Rei Kawakubo’s humorous costumes toy with the idea of physical distortions, such as humps and big rear ends. They are in mostly vertical blue stripes on white, or in pale green and white-checkered patterns. For much of the dance, five or six dancers twist and pose, each in his or her own space, with a rush of additional dancers to the stage toward the end of the performance. The bold electronic musical score is by Takehisa Kosugi.

MICHAEL CLARK COMPANY

マイケル·クラーク·カンパニー
Tate Project Part I ]

The choreography rehearsed and performed in 2010 paired the rigour of classical steps with contemporary movement, a juxtaposition that paralleled Clark’s training as a ballet dancer at the Royal Ballet, and his later anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian choreographic experiments. Balletic poses, jumps and steps were isolated from traditional narrative sequences and made strange through repetition. The graceful leaps and turns of the trained dancers seemed awkward and uneven, just as they were often out of sync and oriented in different directions. This choreography paralleled the performance space, which was demarcated by geometric and striped floor mats designed by Charles Atlas, which resembled the large windows at the back of the hall and the black beams that extend vertically from floor to ceiling.

Lucinda Childs

Pastime

Pastime takes place in three different spatial locations so that the simple in-place theme with the flexed foot can be presented in three difference situations: vertical, enclosed (in tubular jersey), and upside down.

Dancer: Gabrielle Revlock