- Venue
- New York - various venues
- Location
- United States
Apart from the turquoise-leotard wearing dancers who perform in them, each of the spaces chosen by Pablo Bronstein for his Plaza Minuet have one thing in common. These grand halls in New York’s wealthy financial district are all ‘privately owned public spaces’: areas designated for public use and maintained by private companies. When Bronstein’s dancers bound into each venue, mark a cross on the floor and move in slow unison between Ballet positions, they are simply exercising their public right to be there. So what makes them look so strange?
Firstly, the dancers’ costumes deliberately jar with their surroundings. Their bright, figure-hugging leotards clash with the décor and the dark suits worn by those who work nearby. Secondly, the dancers’ movements look out of place. These splendid lobbies, with their marble pillars, palm trees and ambient lighting, are used as spaces to walk through, not perform in. Even the vast atrium of 60 Wall Street (owned by Deutsche Bank), in which people play chess on tables and chairs at the sides of the hall, functions mainly as a thoroughfare on the way to the subway.
These public spaces have been carefully designed by their private owners with particular uses in mind. But by marking out their own area in the middle of each venue, as well as marking themselves as visually different, the dancers in Plaza Minuet ignore both the architectural imperatives of the buildings’ design and the social implications of other people’s willingness to abide by them. In 60 Wall Street, for example, the trees and pillars are not just grand but they also compel people forward, narrowing pathways and suggesting direction. The dancers cut across these pathways and the commuters using them, to disrupt the flow of movement.
Put simply, the dancers don’t behave like you’re supposed to – they don’t behave in the way these spaces expect. As well as looking strange, this misbehaviour exposes the rules the rest of us follow. But it’s more than mere resistance to authority that makes the Plaza Minuet dancers stand out – it’s competition to it. The artist, Pablo Bronstein and a choreographer, Hilary Nanney, instruct the dancers when to change position, and they correct individuals when they make a mistake. In this way, the dancers in Plaza Minuet do not simply disobey the silent rules of their architectural surroundings, but they submit to an alternative authority – the bodily discipline of Ballet, as embodied by Bronstein and Nanney.
Brought together physically, the authority of Ballet and the authority of the architecture of public space expose the ideological implications of each other. The comparison between the two is illuminating, because both types of authority compete on the same terms. Both Ballet and the architecture of public space adopt a strong visual code (turquoise leotards/ marble pillars); both expect silent complicity from their subjects (no rewards for success, only punishment –for example, looking strange – for failure); and both seek to incorporate individuals into a compliant group (with no reward, conformity must be an end in itself.) It’s also illuminating because these terms normally remain hidden – naturalisation, in fact, is another tactic the two types of authority share. While the beautiful illusion of Ballet is maintained by its disavowal of physical hardship, the awesome spell of Wall Street’s architecture is preserved by the myth of the easy accumulation of wealth.
Plaza Minuet enacts a competition between the authority of Ballet and the authority of the architecture of public space, the process of which makes them both visible. But, just as the ‘lie’ of capitalism is not weakened, according to Marx, by its exposure, this explication of institutional authority is far from critical of its subject. Opening up the machinations of Ballet and of the architecture of public space, Plaza Minuet questions the institutions’ claims to natural authority; but it also suggests that authority itself is inescapable – the only way to notice one set of rules is to succumb to the other.
In fact, it’s this interest in rules as a principle – rather than what they stand for – that finally marks the dancers in Plaza Minuet as strange. Even though Ballet is exposed as a form of bodily control, the dancers choose to conform to its strictures. This choice to comply goes against the pervasive individualism of twenty-first century Euro-American culture. Indeed, it goes against the capitalistic individualism on which Wall Street’s wealth is built, at the same time as it questions the veracity of that myth by exposing the architectural authority that supports it. Using a dance derived from Renaissance-era court practise, Plaza Minuet reaches behind our understanding of the individual and questions the sovereignty of the twenty-first century subject.
