The Dancer´s Two Bodies
A two-day seminar, 4-5 August, 7-10 PM, Overgaden
By thinker and artist Jalal Toufic
Who is presently visiting Copenhagen!
The Dancer´s Two Bodies: (Danserens To Kroppe): Vi vil kigge på forholdet for dansen, hvilket forbinder direkte hvad én som ikke danser ville opfatte og opleve som ikke-tilgrænsende rum-tider, til film, dette medie af pludselig “forandring af sted og fokus” (Walter Benjamin); danseres fastfrysning, hvilket, som det genetiske element af bevægelse, er en tilstand af mulighed for alle slags ekstraordinære bevægelser (baglæns i tid bevægelse, slow motion…); fraktions dimensionerne af det, af dans, forandrede rum med dets flade, ofte malede baggrunde og dens zoner af rumlig ikke-eksistens; rumskabelse af danseren.
Jalal Toufic (oversat af ngw)
Overgaden, Institut for Samtidskunst
Neden Vandet 17
DK-1414 København K
www.overgaden.org
4. & 5. august 2009
begge dage 19:00-22:00
Free admission!
The Dancer’s Two Bodies
While watching a great dance film, I witnessed a dancer enter a painting. Taking into account that human bodies cannot do this, was that movement metaphorical or symbolic or oneiric? It was none of these. It struck me as a fact, an aesthetic fact. Consequently, since it happened and since normal human bodies cannot enter paintings, the question becomes: what kind of body is produced by dance and can do what I just witnessed, enter a painting? It is a subtle body with different characteristics than the physical one. In one sort of “dance,” the dancer remains in the homogenous space and time where his or her physical body is—I consider this sort a form of theater or performance rather than dance. But another kind of dance projects a subtle dancer into a realm of altered movement, body, space and time specific to it. We will study the relation of dance, which connects directly what someone who is not dancing would consider and experience as non-contiguous space-times, to cinema, this medium of sudden “changes of place and focus” (Walter Benjamin); the freezing of dancers, which, as the genetic element of movement, is a condition of possibility for all sorts of extraordinary movements (backward in time motion, slow motion …); the fractional dimensions of the altered space of dance with its flat, often painted backdrops and its zones of spatial inexistence; and space-creation by the dancer.
Jalal Toufic
Recommended Reading:
— John Cage, Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
— Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 60-64.
— Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” trans. Thomas G. Neumiller, The Drama Review: TDR 16, no. 3 (September 1972): 22-26.
— Jalal Toufic, Forthcoming (Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 2000), 194-209.
Recommended Films:
— Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain (1952).
— Vincente Minnelli, An American in Paris (1951); The Band Wagon (1953); excerpts from Yolanda and the Thief (1945).
— Excerpts from Charles Walters, Easter Parade (1948); The Belle of New York (1952).
— Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943); At Land (1944); A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945); Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946).
— Elliot Caplan/Merce Cunnigham, Points in Space (1986).
— Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Red Shoes (1948); “Olympia” from The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).
— Carlos Saura’s Blood Wedding (1980); Carmen (1983); Love, the Magician (1986).
— David Blair, Giselle, American Ballet Theater (with Carla Fracci and Erik Bruhn), 1969.
— Oleg Vinogradov, Coppélia, The Kirov Ballet, 1993.
Jalal Toufic er aktuel kunstner i
Copenhagen Artist in Residence
juli & august 2009
JALAL TOUFIC: tænker og kunstner.
Hans arbejde har været vist på steder som: Artists Space, New York; ICA, London; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark; Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center; og 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) i et “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. Han har holdt foredrag på U-TURN Kvadriennalen i København og undervist på University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, USC, DAS ARTS og Rijksakademie i Amsterdam, USEK i Libanon og er i øjeblikket Professor på Kadir Has Universitetet i Istanbul.
http://www.jalaltoufic.com
Vært for Jalal Toufic: Nanna Guldhammer Wraae,
for more info: 0045-51437598, ngwraae@nullgmail.com
Tak til: CPH AIR, Overgaden: Institut for Samtidskunst, Anne Bennike og Maria Klarlund.