Flip book

Flip Book arose from the desire to stage the Cunninghamian corpus by European dancers, while at the same time elaborating a “democratic” archive, that is, one accessible to everyone: David Vaughan’s book on Merce Cunningham.

Flip Book arose from the desire to stage the Cunninghamian corpus by European dancers, while at the same time elaborating a “democratic” archive, that is, one accessible to everyone: David Vaughan’s book on Merce Cunningham. This project is a matrix that will be used in creating two other works: “Roman photo” for amateur dancers and “50 years of dance” produced with former dancers from Cunningham’s company, belonging to different generations and brought together for the occasion.
This choreographic work proposes to “perform,” live, the photographs from the book, in chronological order and in their totality. If the “danced forms” are indicated by these photographs, choreographic writing resides in the linkage, in the interweaving of the images, in the spatial arrangement of these stills. Choreographic writing must also address various specific elements: how to introduce the everyday scenes presented in the book? How to suggest the “blurring” present in certain shots, an invisibility which does not allow the dancers to reproduce the figures with precision? The original title of this performance was “Tout Cunningham” (All Cunningham): a work-in-progress, this performance is designed as a flipbook charting Cunningham’s life, and it shows how today’s European dancers are shaped by that American heritage.

Source : Boris Charmatz

More informations :
http://www.borischarmatz.org/