Our Monthly Favourites

Dance

Dance in the Sun, Shirley Clarke, 1953

Dance in the Sun shows choreographer Daniel Nagrin’s dance rehearsal from his entrance into the studio with accompanist Sylvia Marshall on the piano to the end, when the latter hands him a cigarette as soon as he is done to discuss possible changes. There are two present and distinct spaces in which the performance takes place; a rather dark dance room, fabricated by human-made, in contrast to a wild beach, without any presence of mankind.

We navigate through those locations with the camera’s work following the movements’ succession perfectly edited to create a fluid perpetual motion, with the same background melody. When the performance happens indoors, it seems to be interpreted for humans’ eyes, whereas the outdoor scenes give the impression of moving solely for the dancer’s inner freedom and pure feeling of self, without any direct audience’s gaze, except for the camera’s lens. 

The short film is an experimental piece directed by the great Shirley Clarke in 1953, and I highly recommend watching her long feature The Connection (1961), one of the first mockumentary ever directed in a huis clos depicting drug addiction with pretty amazing jazz live performances.

Bodas de Sangre, 1981, Carlos Saura

Bodas de Sangre (Carlos Saura, 1981) shows a dance company getting ready from the messy backstages to this wide clear space that is the room in which they are finally performing, to adapt the theatrical piece written by Federico Garcia Lorca telling the tragic story of a wedding in rural Andalousia. The camera captures bodies in movement to render a beautiful tribute to flamenco.

The film becomes a complex multi-layered piece of artwork for its completeness; the diegetic sound and music coming from musicians, the impressive camera work to encapsulate beautiful images and well framed scenes from what is originally adapted in theatre, and finally the incredible double-layered acting; the characters played in the theatrical representation embedded in the other narrative that makes the film.

The Dante Project - Wayne McGregor

In The Dante Project, dance becomes interior design by other means. Wayne McGregor’s choreography moves through Tacita Dean’s (which we have previously written about for Décor en Scène) revolving architectural environments like a living mood board, each circle of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso rendered as confirmatory proof that space shapes behaviour as much as bodies do.

Dean’s sets feel less like backdrops than rooms under psychological pressure: scorched voids, mirrored corridors, vertiginous stairways that suggest both cathedrals and contemporary atriums. The dancers don’t decorate these interiors; they bring life to them and many times the viewer can observe how the set echoes the bodies of the dancers on stage. 

What’s striking is how modern the interiors feel: coolly monumental, almost corporate, despite their medieval sourced material. Light becomes a physical element of the stage, just like furnishings. Darkness is used like a wall treatment.

The Dante Project reminds us that dance and interior design share a fundamental ambition: to choreograph how we move, feel, and remember within a space. Long after the dancers exit, the rooms linger, imprinted on the body like a place you once lived and never fully left.

Just as Abbott stated in Flatland: “Dimension implies direction, implies measurement, implies the more and the less” (1884), thus also testifying to how the physical realm impacts our thoughts and reflections.