MUSEOGRAPHY

CHOREOGRAPHY

I was invited in 2023 by dance organisation se.s.ta to respond, by means of choreography, to the very ambitious exhibition “1939–2021: The End of the Black-and-White Era”. After a year-long process, the performance premiered in September 2024. The brief included working with dance artists from Prague and in dialogue with curator Michal Novotný.

The exhibition displays exclusively works from the National Gallery Prague collection, which bear witness to the history of the country and the life of the visual arts in that history, as well as to the history of the institution itself, at the intersection of both. The exhibition traces the movements across these spheres, interrogating the distinction between collective and individual and the related notion of what we consider (artistic) freedom.

The overwhelming number of works and possible readings offered by the selection, the layout and the scenography, as well as my own lack of knowledge of Czech artistic and political history, made this invitation challenging. Instead of zooming in on one section of the show, I chose to anchor my choreographic response in two aspects which cut across the whole exhibition:

– Constant making and undoing of categories: categories help us to navigate the world by distinguishing and connecting but only allow for a partial and sometimes violently redacted view of the realities to which they are applied.

– The blurring of the notion of quality: how can quality be felt as situated and therefore unstable, rather than imposed dogmatically by various schools fighting each other?

Radial Temporality… a very long, stretched-out ending

If dance embodies moments, how to embody the 82-year-long “end of the black-and-white era”? The exhibition displays an ongoing dissolution of binary categories that nevertheless operate discursively and politically, varying across different times, whereby artworks, aesthetics and methodologies are placed in shifting categorisations. These do not disappear but lose their presumed fixity. Projecting the categories into space, as art exhibitions do by default, or following a linear dramaturgy and suggested reading – whether moving from start to finish or experienced in a piece of performance art unfolding over time – inevitably tends to fix the categories, even if only presumably.

To unfold the presumption of fixity imposed by linear temporality, I worked with the dancers on a radial temporality. Through developing a metastable situation from which dances emerge and respond to each other, we stretch time and point the attention to the singularity of each dance. Echoes and contrasts spread across time and the space; the tension of waiting never resolves. Visitors are invited to spend time with this situation, sense the vibratory field running among the dancers, and observe the dances from afar or up close, as they appear along with the unfolding but often inscrutable relationships between them.

Choreographic Approach: a play with unqualified difference

We worked with juxtaposed dance scores which call attention upon difference and sameness, multiplicity and singularities, bypassing logical analysis. Can we actually notice differences within multiplicity and the singularities within sameness without the analytic, discriminatory and comparative functions of categories? Or, can we attain this with a categorisation tool that is ever-changing in its criteria, as the exhibition “1939–2021: The End of the Black-and-White Era“ does when selecting and grouping the artworks?

From an undifferentiated, unqualified, pre-categorical, ongoing and ever-changing base, a “landscape“ of forms emerges from the performers’ bodies in the space. Between sculptural compositions and fields of tensions, formal and expressive relationships between bodies are traversed by textural modifications. Stillness vibrates with contrary forces, meteorological nuances and searching gazes. This is also a field for unspoken negotiations. The dancers listen and let dances emerge from temporary configurations, dances that respond to each other in inexplicable logic.

MUSEOGRAPHY

CHOREOGRAPHY