Elaine Summers, Anna Halprin, Hendricus Th. Wijdeveld, Alvin Curran
Un dancing per ballare
05.18.2019 – 09.07.2019
Elaine Summers, Anna Halprin, Hendricus Th. Wijdeveld, Alvin Curran
Un dancing per ballare
05.18.2019 – 09.07.2019
Un dancing per ballare is the outcome of the cooperation with several artists we have met in the latest years in the countryside of South Salento as well as in down town New York. The spaces involved have an experimental character, since they reject strict institutional boundaries, and have retained their power to directly contribute to the growth of an imagery connected to the theme of dwelling. They are not public museums, nor private foundations, but houses and dwellings that have expanded our gaze on the idea of the domestic space as a political space. We went looking for the roots, unearthing those experiences that between the 1950s and the 1970s could deconstruct traditional notions of artistic production.
As pioneering interdisciplinary experiments, with the seminar model as a tool for collective creation, these artistic practices have embodied a radical approach towards architecture and landscape, and have shown a great attention towards environmental, social, and gender issues.
Judson Fragment (1964), a film by Elaine Summers, narrates the extraordinary experience of the Judson Dance Theatre in New York (1962 – 1964), a heterogeneous group of dancers and experimenters of multimedia arts that were able to develop a totally new economy of movement. With their systemic critique of conventional aesthetic hierarchies, they have subverted the ethereal image of the dancer’s body and they have introduced on stage the “ordinary movement”, i.e. the movements of everyday life. They interacted with objects of common use and wore everyday clothes, thus deconstructing the artist’s authorship and prioritising collective creation. They also introduced composition strategies based on a minimal amount of directives, which favoured spontaneousness, interpretation, and improvisation. Alvin Curran applies some of these principles to his research in sound, in order to willingly annihilate the artistic ego in its entirety, using the body as a musical instrument and composing music based on improvisation. These elements, that gain a visual form in the graphic signs on his music scores, create a polyphonic space and unlock the awareness of the present being. Apartment 6 (1965), a choreography by Anna Halprin, is exactly based on the awareness of gesture, that challenges the theatre’s stage with a snapshot of everyday life. Usual activities such as cooking, reading a newspaper, or listening to the radio, call for reconnecting the actions of art to those of daily life. Anna and her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, developed various forms of collective creativity. They held a series of seminars called “Experiments in Environment” that involved dancers, architects and other artists, which explored group creativity in connection with the awareness of the environment, be it rural or urban. Such practices were inspired by the experience of Gropius, whose seminars were conducted with a methodology that mixed various artistic disciplines. However, the Académie Européenne Méditerranée, planned in the early 1930s by Hendricus Th. Wijdeveld, Erich Mendelsohn and Amédée Ozenfant along the model of the Bauhaus in Dessau, was never realised. The Académie would also be marked by spaces for community life and by a multidisciplinary teaching programme that would involve all forms of art, including music, video art, and dance. Hendricus Th. Wijdeveld indeed realised a school in a smaller scale, Elckerlyc in Lage Vuursche (The Netherlands), but throughout his life he continued to plan his ideal academy, that included the utopian attempt to bring the Dutch experience to the countryside of Salento.
Un dancing per ballare is thus a melange of artworks, photographic documents, music scores, and handwritten letters, combined together for starting a dialogue on our most immediate concerns, which we aim to explore throughout time with our public program. The series of multidisciplinary events will take place not only in the venue of studioconcreto, but it will also involve several domestic spaces that have an emblematic value in our research. Firstly, Fondazione Lac O Le Mon, an early-19th century mansion restored following principles of sustainable energy, that for over four years has been hosting young artists from all over the world and that regularly hosts joint laboratories and shared community life. Secondly, Spigolizzi, a country house in Southern Salento where the Belgian sculptor Norman Mommens and the English writer Patience Gray used to live. In the late 1960s the couple, after a long period of travelling, found in the countryside of Salve an old house in ruins, where they decide they could settle down. The house became the receptacle of their talents and reflections, and they turned it into a living place, perfectly integrated in the social context surrounding them. They interrogated themselves about the anthropological and human aspects of everyday life, in an intense dialogue with nature and artistic production, and connected themselves to the rest of the world from a different perspective.
Un dancing per ballare was realised thanks to the Artistic Estate of Elaine Summers, supported by Kinetic Awareness® Center, Inc. with special thans to: the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at New York City Public Library for the Performing Arts; Archivio Anna Halprin; Archivio Rudy Perez; Archivio Spigolizzi; Nick Gray, Maggie Armstrong, Giorgia Gandolfini, Roberto Ciardo, and Margherita Macrì.
The public program of the exhibition will host Jimmie Durham & Maria Thereza Alves, Casa a Mare, Francesca Mariano, Sergio Solombrino, and Alvin Curran, according to the following event calendar:
15 June | Video | Jimmie Durham & Maria Thereza Alves, The Man Who Had a Beautiful House (1994); Casa a Mare, Dwelling Art (2015)
22 July – 2 August | Workshop | Prima materia with Anna Homler and Francesca Mariano
29 July | Talk | I tre filosofi dell’abitare [The three philosophers of dwelling] curated by Sergio Solombrino
7 September | Live performance | Alvin Curran, Live in Spigolizzi