open hall

Walked in the Turbine hall of the Tate modern under sounds of a personally lived music time. Had to go up and down the stairs to be able to find a place to stand from where I could see the performance. Deep down in the hall, with simple slow movements, the choreography unravelled a sense of communication and continuation as well as a projection of the lines of the environment, including building and people. The voice of David Bowie and the imposing sounds of his music deepened the space even more and by doing so dragged along the non performing audience as well. Oh yes, there was performing audience!

The project of the Michael Clark company spread in the summer months – displayed as a live artwork – presented open rehearsals there in the turbine hall and involved more than 70 persons of the audience who were taught during this period and performed together with the dancers of the group at the final shows.

I find it superb the fact that more and more art projects look at art with an inclusive mind and the thought of involving rather than excelling alone. The idea of direct contact with the non-skilled in a specific field and the elevation of all through the extra effort of the skilled and the non-skilled together, is certainly not new; however, it is becoming more eminent now as a back wave to the ones who entrenched the artists’ professional activities with arrogance and fear and called that ‘a career’. That is the job that mostly art administrators learned to do (see Arno van Roosmalen, director of stroom den haag), encouraged by the curators era which is already fading away. The Internet world has opened a path of openness and accessibility; the real creators of our times and those who support them know to which door they turn their back and on which path they can walk in good company.

open rehearsal, Michael Clark company, Turbine hall 29 August 2010
open rehearsal from above, Turbine hall, Tate Modern, 29 August 2010

One thought on “open hall

  1. ”involving rather than excelling alone”, I agree and to go further, if you involve, you will find that you will excel beyond your own expectations.
    Thanks Sofia for your articles.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s