- Venue
- Royal Academy of Arts
- Location
- London
In a site-specific performance at the Royal Academy of Arts on 11 July 2008, Grimshaw Architectural Practice and Green Bean Dance explored how architecture and movement can transform space. Dancers holding triangular folding structures performed at the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts having as backdrop the gigantic sculptures of Anthony Caro. The dance piece, which was choreographed by Katie Green, together with the flexible sustainable structures designed by the architects generated tensile links between architecture and dance, body and structure in space.
The performance aimed to be a metaphor for energy and sustainability in building producing complexity out of simple materials and human movement. Although we think of architecture as rooted on earth, the flexible, triangular structures could fold and unfold in origami style – their flapping folds, being moved in space by the dancers reminiscent of wings and flight. The dancers as if like bats were taking cover in the cavities of Caro’s neutral grey sculpture only to reappear again. As the dancers grouped together the pieces multiplied and extended to form larger angular constructions.
The dancers moved in predetermined paths which have been originally designed by the architects and translated through choreography into spatial movement resulting in intimate integration of design and dance. There was an element of abstraction, similar to Oscar Schlemmer’s Space Dance, as structure became part of the dancer’s kinesphere, interlocking man-made with the organic in movement, producing a geometrical fluidity and experience of space through structure.
According to Merleau-Ponty we perceive the world through our bodies. The title Embodied Energy refers to the notion of embodiment – the biological and physical presence of the human body and the energy it can generate as a necessary precondition for subjectivity, emotion and feelings, language and thought as well as interaction with space and the world.
Professor of architecture Juhani Pallasmaa’s more poetic signification of body, structure and space refers to the notion of building as an existential space; man-made structure as an instrument with which we confront the cosmos. As the skin of the building is the boundary line of the self and its contact with the world we need to conceptualise the notion of an embodied architecture, both art and architecture as an existential, body-space experience which articulates our being in the world
The five interactive performances, part of the London Festival of Architecture, will take place in the following London venues and are free to the public
11 july the royal academy of art courtyard
14 july bankjunction courtyard
16 july carter lane and old change court
19 july cheap side, city of london
20 july exmouth market
Eva Pryce is artist, art historian, and associate lecturer at Wimbledon College of Art. Her book INVISIBLE TRANSFORMATIONS in the work of nikos navridis ISBN 978-0-9557838-0-7 has been based on her research of his video installations.
