Roman Photo

Following “Flip Book,” Boris Charmatz presents a variation on that project and reuses its principle: the staging of the photographs from David Vaughan’s book on Merce Cunningham.

Following Flip Book, Boris Charmatz presents a variation on that project and reuses its principle: the staging of the photographs from David Vaughan’s book on Merce Cunningham, involving, on this occasion, amateur practitioners, dance students and/or non-dancers. Roman photo obeys a very specific set of rules the dancers need to learn. Each performance is open to adaptations dependent on the configuration of the group. The dancers, as well as the audience, come to share a vision of heterogeneous dancing bodies appropriating and distancing themselves from the physicality typical of Cunnigham’s technique. Cunningham’s dance appears different, sometimes clumsy, and always renewed, through the experience of bodies connected to a cultural tradition rich in the structure of contemporary dance. This project is engaged with shared heritage. The selected extract shows the first group assembled in Rennes on the occasion of the Preview of the Museum of Dance. In Roman photo, the principle tying choreographic construction to D. Vaughan’s book is very intense: “photographies vivantes” (i.e. photographic tableaux vivants—trans.) succeed one another and stand out more than in other versions where the principle is submitted to more intricate layers of choreographic construction.

Source : Boris Charmatz

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