[some thinking about dance from other angles, and ways of using video and dance… looking at the moving body (and what if this movement moves across generations, we may ask?) …thought it might be of interest for us. below, from the press release of the exhibition “Trances”]

Mathias Poledna
Version, 2004.
16mm black and white film, 10:40 min (16mm frame enlargement)
Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna.

Trances
Four dance-related works from the permanent collections
Rineke Dijkstra, Douglas Gordon, Joachim Koester, Mathias Poledna.
11th of october- 15th of december

Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart
Place du Château
87600 Rochechouart, France

“Why have moving images of bodies taken the place of statues? Because the world has been set in motion, firstly as a planet, then as a poetic universe,” wrote Jean Louis Schefer in the introduction to his On the World and Moving Images. Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art’s new exhibition “Trances” explores this theme of the moving body and world through four key works from its collection, evoking aspects of dance, performance as well as experimental, ethnographic or science films.

Rineke Dijkstra’s The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaadam (1996-1997), records the behaviour of adolescents at a night club as they dance in front of a white backdrop, isolated from the crowd. They are filmed directly facing the camera but rapidly forget its presence as the techno beat takes over. Douglas Gordon, in Hysterical (1995), appropriates an old science film, projecting it in slow motion and partly reversed to obtain a mirror effect on two tilted screens, this double screen projection creating a three-dimensional space that spectators can move through and walk around. The film itself is an early 20th century documentary on hysteria, the study of which provided foundations for the beginnings of modern psychoanalysis. Mathias Poledna’s short film Version shows a group of dancers silently floating in darkness. Their lack of any identifiable location heightens the sense of mystery and increases the dancers’ photogenic impact. Poledna also playfully evokes the feeling of an historical setting without ever pinpointing a specific moment in time. Like a haunted doppelgänger of this film, Joachim Koester’s Tarantism shows actors imitating the trance-like states witnessed in primitive dance rituals, faking convulsions not unlike those seen in Douglas Gordon’s Hysterical. The title Tarantism refers to the folk dance from Southern Italy thought to have its origins in the spasms caused by the tarantula spider’s bite. In a predominently Catholic country, the dance survives, some claim, as a remnant of ancient Dionysian practices.