A Choreographer Climbs the Walls at Bard
Posted by: Dan Shaw
Posted on: Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Comments
This performance was a beautiful piece of dance mounted on a beautiful piece of architecture. I highly recommend catching next weekend’s performance -
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The Richard B. Fisher Center helped put Bard College on the cultural map, and now the Fisher Center is putting dancers on the roof of the iconic Frank Gehry-designed building. This weekend and next, site-specific Canadian choreographer Noémie Lafrance will premiere a work called Rapture on the brushed stainless-steel exterior of the arts center, which opened in 2003.
Rapture is the kind of highbrow, avant garde world premiere that doesn’t normally take place in a rural setting with sponsorship by Tiffany & Co. (which got involved because it sells gold and silver architectonic jewelry designed by Gehry.) After all, Lafrance’s most famous work, Agora, was staged in an empty, gigantic public swimming pool in trendy Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the gritty, residential neighborhood of choice for emerging artists. Rapture is as much an engineering as aesthetic challenge, and Lafrance is working with master rigger Sean Riley, the star of the National Geographic Channel’s World’s Toughest Fixes, and her dancers will travel across the building via an innovative kinetic-rigging system. The audience will be allowed to circle the building during the performance.
Lafrance hopes Rapture will allow Gehry’s architecture to be appreciated in a new light. “I am interested in the interaction between the places/structures we design, which define our navigation through space and the relations, whether psychological, historical, mythical or physical we might have to them as human beings,“ Lafrance says in her artist’s statement. “The rigging system we have designed for Rapture will allow us to work in close intimacy with the building from multiple angles and dimensions. From there we will develop a new and abstract language that resonate the very unique textures and musicality of the architecture and reflect it in movement.“
Lafrance foresees Rapture as the first in a series of dances performed on Gehry buildings and hopes to choreograph pieces for nine structures, including the Walt Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles and his groundbreaking Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. So if you go to Bard this weekend or next, you’ll be able to say you saw a global phenomenon here first.
Rapture
Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College
Annandale on Hudson, NY
845.758.7900
September 25 - 28 & October 2 - 5
7 PM
$25 adults; $22.50 seniors
This is an outdoor performance. In case of rain, performance will be cancelled. Please contact box office four hours before performance for weather update and to reschedule tickets if necessary.
Special Group Discount
10 tickets for $100
A Group of 10 Tickets may be purchased for $100 by contacting Elena Batt, Fisher Center Box Office Manager, at 845.758.7948
