Project completion: 2018
FLUX Laboratory Genève’s honoring proposal to photograph the rehearsals and the La Création du Monde show by Darius Milhaud (1923) raised an important question from the very beginning: how would a landscape and architecture approach a theatrical performance of modern dance? Will oneuse the already familiar visual vocabulary or try to speak a new language?
While preparing before the shooting as well as during the first rehearsals with the dancers and the choreographers of the show the answer became clear. Observing the characteristics of Millicent Hodson’s choreographythat attributed respect to Jean Borlin’s original one and Kenneth Archer’s costumes and scenography that respectively transcribed Fernand Leger’s original work, one could only conclude that despite the dancers’ movement in space, the ballet seemed to be a continuous sequence of two-dimensional modernist paintings that could be viewed exclusively by one and one only view point: frontal and absolutely central, as one would observe an artwork in a museum or an art gallery.
Fernand Leger’s costumes clearly proposed the way they should be photographed. With the kind collaboration of the National School of Dance (KSOT) dancers and the people of FLUX Laboratory, a photo studio was set up within the Athens Concert Hall, where dancers one-by-one reproduced the choreography of their role shortly before heading to rehearsal.
The resulting photographs represent nothing more than a series of dance portraits that become autonomous art works while downplaying the third dimension. The result attempts to justify the original intention, and at the same time capture and enrich the central idea of both original and contemporary creators of the piece.
