Performance combines dance, architecture while exploring contemporary city life
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Monday, August 09, 2004
BEIRUT: This summer's Beiteddine Festival hit its high point this weekend with the performance "Metapolis: Project 972." An intriguing and thought-provoking collaboration between architect Zaha Hadid and choreographer Frederic Flamand, "Metapolis" brought 14 agile dancers, three monumental silver bridges, and a dense mesh of audio-visual technologies to the stage on Friday night.
Hadid, the Pritzker Prize-winning Iraqi who is well known for her daring, unconventional, and notably artistic designs, was clearly the main draw, and the nearly sold-old crowd responded both warmly and rapturously when she stepped onstage for a final bow at the end of the night's show. But if audience members initially made the trek to Beiteddine to see Hadid's iconic shapes in motion, then they got that and much more over the course of the performance's 70-minutes of sheer sensory overload.
"Metapolis" features a dizzying collection of elements. There are the sets and costumes designed by Hadid, movements choreographed by Flamand, and then layer upon layer of visual material projected onto a screen, interspersed with live footage of the dancers shot by a cameraman onstage. At certain points, the dancers wear clothing made of blue screens, such that their costumes carry additional visual material on the screen behind them. With clips of fast-track urban life, gyrating architectural renderings, portraits sliding onscreen from left to right, and disaster footage imploding in between, "Metapolis" unfolds at a frantic pace, with nearly continuous music blending abstract techno, discordant noise, and jazzy riffs into a full and complex texture.
The motivation behind "Metapolis" is an exploration of the contemporary city, sprawling, rapacious, universal, generic and in danger of losing its center. It is a vision of urban life epitomized by Los Angeles and taken here to a dehumanizing extreme. In the past, Hadid has said that "the point was that the space itself could dance," and indeed this is exactly what happens as the performance unfolds.
Early in the show, there are two male dancers onstage. Their moves are captured in grainy black-and-white footage and amplified on the screen behind them, such that their athleticism and physicality is made grand, impressive, and palpable. But as the performance continues, the dancers lose their corporeal presence. They are woven into the structural fabric of the city as everything begins to move. Hadid's three bridges, which tuck into one another, become strangely more human than the bodies that scale them, and the whole space of the performance becomes animated - at rare moments beautifully, at others more agitatedly so.
Bad jokes about the questionable union between dance and architecture abound. It's a well-worn analogy that any impossible action - inconceivable, ill-advised, with results most likely awful - is "like dancing about architecture." But Frederic Flamand has been mining the intersection between these two disciplines for years now and his results are more often brilliant.
Flamand heads up the Brussels-based company Cherleroi Danses/Plan K. He started his career working for such figures as theater guru Jerzy Grotowski and literary legend William S. Burroughs. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he created a trilogy of performances in collaboration with Italian installation artist Fabrizio Plessi. Then, in 1996, he produced "Moving Target" with New York-based artists and architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio (otherwise known as the incomparable duo Diller + Scofidio). An inquiry into the schizophrenic body in architectural space, "Moving Target" was followed in 1998 by another Diller + Scofidio collaboration, "Muybridge: Man Walking at Ordinary Speed," which looked at the relationship between photography, animated images, and truth, as well as at oppositions between men and women.
Since then, Flamand has worked with French architect Jean Nouvel on a project called "Body/Work/Leisure" and is collaborating with American architect Thom Mayne on "Silent Collisions," a performance inspired by Italo Calvino's much-loved novel "Invisible Cities." "Metapolis" was first produced in 2000 and has been touring for four years, taking up residence in locations as far flung as the Edinburgh Festival, the Singapore Arts Festival, and the Istanbul Theater Festival.
Flamand has said that his interest in cross-disciplinary work stems from a desire to find the interface between live performance and new technology, and that he sees this interface more as a contamination of languages than anything else. As such, his company provides an ever-malleable canvas for his co-conspirators to work with.
However, a high-tech interface with live performance need not entail full-scale dehumanization. The Wooster Group, a New York-based theater troupe, has been toying with this intersection for years, and to dazzling affect. In "To You the Birdie (Phedre)," they took many of the same elements at play in "Metapolis" and managed to maintain a sense of humanity and emotional investment throughout. But there was a certain sorrow at seeing those bodies on stage on Friday fading to ornamentation.
The emotional tone of the show was set entirely by the visuals and the music. The choreography at times seemed completely incidental. The architecture of those bridges became grand, Richard Serra-like, and moving, but to what effect?
At one point, the images on screen course through famine in Africa, and then dissolve into footage of a building imploding. The dancers stand still on the bridge, their backs to the audience, watching the apocalyptic scene unfold. Then architectural blueprints emerge as the music kicks into a more upbeat rhythm. Is it necessary to project tragedy by skipping outside of city life (and out of the bounds of this particular project's stated agenda) and into third world misery? Is the point here that architecture saves when the body fails?
All told, "Metapolis" is a sensory feast and is full of questions. As such, it is likely one of the most intellectually curious performances to hit the summer festival season in Lebanon, and the issues it raises about art, architecture, city life, and the human body give audiences much to think about. And as an opportunity to see Hadid's vision at work and her work in motion, "Metapolis" was not to be missed.
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By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Monday, August 09, 2004
BEIRUT: This summer's Beiteddine Festival hit its high point this weekend with the performance "Metapolis: Project 972." An intriguing and thought-provoking collaboration between architect Zaha Hadid and choreographer Frederic Flamand, "Metapolis" brought 14 agile dancers, three monumental silver bridges, and a dense mesh of audio-visual technologies to the stage on Friday night.
Hadid, the Pritzker Prize-winning Iraqi who is well known for her daring, unconventional, and notably artistic designs, was clearly the main draw, and the nearly sold-old crowd responded both warmly and rapturously when she stepped onstage for a final bow at the end of the night's show. But if audience members initially made the trek to Beiteddine to see Hadid's iconic shapes in motion, then they got that and much more over the course of the performance's 70-minutes of sheer sensory overload.
"Metapolis" features a dizzying collection of elements. There are the sets and costumes designed by Hadid, movements choreographed by Flamand, and then layer upon layer of visual material projected onto a screen, interspersed with live footage of the dancers shot by a cameraman onstage. At certain points, the dancers wear clothing made of blue screens, such that their costumes carry additional visual material on the screen behind them. With clips of fast-track urban life, gyrating architectural renderings, portraits sliding onscreen from left to right, and disaster footage imploding in between, "Metapolis" unfolds at a frantic pace, with nearly continuous music blending abstract techno, discordant noise, and jazzy riffs into a full and complex texture.
The motivation behind "Metapolis" is an exploration of the contemporary city, sprawling, rapacious, universal, generic and in danger of losing its center. It is a vision of urban life epitomized by Los Angeles and taken here to a dehumanizing extreme. In the past, Hadid has said that "the point was that the space itself could dance," and indeed this is exactly what happens as the performance unfolds.
Early in the show, there are two male dancers onstage. Their moves are captured in grainy black-and-white footage and amplified on the screen behind them, such that their athleticism and physicality is made grand, impressive, and palpable. But as the performance continues, the dancers lose their corporeal presence. They are woven into the structural fabric of the city as everything begins to move. Hadid's three bridges, which tuck into one another, become strangely more human than the bodies that scale them, and the whole space of the performance becomes animated - at rare moments beautifully, at others more agitatedly so.
Bad jokes about the questionable union between dance and architecture abound. It's a well-worn analogy that any impossible action - inconceivable, ill-advised, with results most likely awful - is "like dancing about architecture." But Frederic Flamand has been mining the intersection between these two disciplines for years now and his results are more often brilliant.
Flamand heads up the Brussels-based company Cherleroi Danses/Plan K. He started his career working for such figures as theater guru Jerzy Grotowski and literary legend William S. Burroughs. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he created a trilogy of performances in collaboration with Italian installation artist Fabrizio Plessi. Then, in 1996, he produced "Moving Target" with New York-based artists and architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio (otherwise known as the incomparable duo Diller + Scofidio). An inquiry into the schizophrenic body in architectural space, "Moving Target" was followed in 1998 by another Diller + Scofidio collaboration, "Muybridge: Man Walking at Ordinary Speed," which looked at the relationship between photography, animated images, and truth, as well as at oppositions between men and women.
Since then, Flamand has worked with French architect Jean Nouvel on a project called "Body/Work/Leisure" and is collaborating with American architect Thom Mayne on "Silent Collisions," a performance inspired by Italo Calvino's much-loved novel "Invisible Cities." "Metapolis" was first produced in 2000 and has been touring for four years, taking up residence in locations as far flung as the Edinburgh Festival, the Singapore Arts Festival, and the Istanbul Theater Festival.
Flamand has said that his interest in cross-disciplinary work stems from a desire to find the interface between live performance and new technology, and that he sees this interface more as a contamination of languages than anything else. As such, his company provides an ever-malleable canvas for his co-conspirators to work with.
However, a high-tech interface with live performance need not entail full-scale dehumanization. The Wooster Group, a New York-based theater troupe, has been toying with this intersection for years, and to dazzling affect. In "To You the Birdie (Phedre)," they took many of the same elements at play in "Metapolis" and managed to maintain a sense of humanity and emotional investment throughout. But there was a certain sorrow at seeing those bodies on stage on Friday fading to ornamentation.
The emotional tone of the show was set entirely by the visuals and the music. The choreography at times seemed completely incidental. The architecture of those bridges became grand, Richard Serra-like, and moving, but to what effect?
At one point, the images on screen course through famine in Africa, and then dissolve into footage of a building imploding. The dancers stand still on the bridge, their backs to the audience, watching the apocalyptic scene unfold. Then architectural blueprints emerge as the music kicks into a more upbeat rhythm. Is it necessary to project tragedy by skipping outside of city life (and out of the bounds of this particular project's stated agenda) and into third world misery? Is the point here that architecture saves when the body fails?
All told, "Metapolis" is a sensory feast and is full of questions. As such, it is likely one of the most intellectually curious performances to hit the summer festival season in Lebanon, and the issues it raises about art, architecture, city life, and the human body give audiences much to think about. And as an opportunity to see Hadid's vision at work and her work in motion, "Metapolis" was not to be missed.
--
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