In recent years, the art world has seen a proliferation of site-specific installations, while museums and art fairs increasingly include performance, residencies or even live events as part of their core programming. But overt engagement with space and architecture yearns for reflection in the dancer, in the body as transitory architecture. More and more, we see dance invited into contemporary art spaces to act as an ephemeral part of an installation, provide atmosphere at an opening or, more occasionally, perform in direct conversation with the work.
The third edition of CARVALHO gallery’s new biannual performance series, which concluded late last month, sets a different standard when it comes to questions of depth, necessity and meaningful exchange between art forms. Choreographers, dancers and visual artists are invited into a responsive collaboration—a pointed conversation with one another and with the space itself. Here, artistic hierarchies are intentionally dissolved. Each component of the work could stand on its own—but why should it? These invitations have been extended before, and these questions certainly have been asked. So what makes this series feel so resonant?
The 20th Century gifted us many important collaborations between artist and choreographer. There was Martha Graham and Isamu Noguchi—her powerful, angled and anchored choreography reflected and supported in his otherworldly yet familiar sculptural landscapes, where dancers activated sculptural forms not as props but as partners in the scene. Or Merce Cunningham’s radical partnerships with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, in which movement, sound and set unfolded in parallel and refused hierarchy or narrative cohesion, guiding the audience toward no particular conclusion.
Despite this legacy, the full cohesion of these forms remains rare. Dance and visual art often meet unevenly—one being decorative or superfluous to the other. Artwork often serves as a backdrop to a performance, a thin visual scaffold propping up a dance that could stand on its own. Or worse, dance functions as a garnish to visual art, a fundamentally unnecessary flourish swallowed by the main attraction.
CARVALHO’s program begins at the most fundamental point: it understands and accounts for the elemental needs of dance’s development. The series is structurally set up to support skilled, trained bodies and time in its space, and already a range of dance’s voices have been present in the series—from the blending of conceptually rich contemporary choreographer Jodi Melnick with neo-classical prima Sara Mearns to the haunting partnership of New York City Ballet dancers Taylor Stanley and Alec Knight and Dance Theatre of Harlem sensation Ingrid Silva’s mixture of contemporary and classical styles.
Performing a work pushes it through a threshold that, no matter the focus of the dancer, can never be crossed in rehearsal alone. The performances run multiple times, allowing the works to steep, to incrementally absorb the surroundings. Dancers are visually and sometimes physically supported by the installations, while the usual divide between front and back is disrupted—audiences surround them, without a division between the stage and the house, witnessing from all sides the dancers’ effort, struggle and breath. Opening night is only the beginning of a sentence; it is through the luxury of repetition that the thought is completed.
Yet dance is not on the pedestal it is often accustomed to on its proscenium stages, but is rather a guest in art’s house—an honored, live-in guest, calling to mind the Hindu saying: “The Guest is God.” Though the proverbial god may be present, it’s still visual art’s house, and the visual artist in residence is the first to enter the room, to be considered in the equation.
As part of the series, an artist creates a semi-permanent sculptural installation—one that can be experienced and absorbed whether or not the dancers are present. Even in the dancers’ absence, their presence is felt: the installation’s shape, placement, scale and creation have been informed by them. Both the installation and the choreography are given dedicated resources and reverence. Each could stand on its own as an independent work, but like a great love affair, in their interdependence, they become more expansive, more compelling, more powerful.
In the most recent iteration of the series, principal dancer Silva stepped into a new role as a choreographer—a role that is startlingly rare for ballerinas to inhabit. With dancers Elias Re and Vinícius Freire, she created a dance work, titled Echoes on the Wall, in direct relationship with visual artist Rosalind Tallmadge’s installation Pareidolia, a ten-panel construction of hand-cut mirrored mica and silk. The swaying panels are both porous and reflective; we can see through them and literally see ourselves in them.
The space is an oasis on an industrial Brooklyn street—raucous trucks and debris from wooden shipping pallets outside; inside, a rectangle of quiet white walls and smooth concrete floors. In one room, paintings by London-based artist Beau Gabriel hum with the beauty of the Renaissance and the clarity of modernity. To the right, a hallway where a single hanging panel of diaphanous silk and gold appears, beckoning us forward like a siren from the sea—into another room, another world. We can turn right or left, or we can stand still and observe the world through her film. She insists that we choose.
Three dancers in costumes of purple silk and gold, seemingly cut from the panels’ same cloth, enter the room to begin the performance: Silva, both choreographer and dancer in her own piece, one of her first choreographic works—with Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Re and Freire of New Jersey Ballet. Three dancers plus the installation’s ten billowing, dancing panels become a company of thirteen.
The dance piece progresses in stages. Beginning with simple pedestrian movement, at first, it’s unclear what the point of view is. The 20-minute piece contains numerous styles: classical ballet, contemporary improvisation, floor-work. At one point early on, all three dancers are face-down, writhing on the floor—followed by a section meant to include the audience in a call-and-response rhythmic clapping game. In the first performance, the audience didn’t register that the exquisite dancers—moving in a seemingly parallel reality before them—were inviting them to clap along. In another, the rhythm was a hair too complex, and the responses were ill-timed. However, as the work builds, windows of cohesion appear, and the relationship between the dancers and the installation is revealed.
The floating panels act as both scaffolding and co-conspirators—containing and directing their movement, billowing with them as they run by, concealing them from view, reflecting and doubling their images. There are moments of great beauty: Silva held aloft by her partners, above our heads like a dolphin exiting the sea. The solos of the two men offer personal perspectives of movement—Re, imposing and statuesque, uses an improvisation vocabulary born of modern times, yet his natural elegance firmly tethers him to a timeless classical aesthetic. He is playful, making direct eye contact with us as if to put us at ease—his beauty is now ours. Freire is wiry, sprite-like with a simmering humility that invites us in. His indirect intensity builds throughout the piece, and with his exacting and explosive technique, he holds the room in his own right.
Meanwhile Silva is a ballerina at the peak of her powers and clearly a leader accustomed to commanding the stage. She too plays with the audience: peeking out from behind the panels, directing the other dancers in both choreographed and implied ways.
Even with successful cross-disciplinary programs, the resources required to produce new dance works, combined with the ephemerality of the form, offer a challenge in a product-oriented system that often reveres what can be sold and dismisses what cannot. Unlike a painter with a sketch or a writer with a draft, a choreographer cannot develop and execute an idea alone—unless, of course, they are the sole performer. Whereas a painter can take a sketch to canvas, a choreographer may come in with notes or starting points, but the test of their imagination’s design is only realized when movement is placed on bodies in space.
Yet negligible U.S. arts funding leaves little to no resources for a choreographer to meet the necessities of their craft—to work simply for the sake of developing material. There are few residencies, fellowships or galleries that understand—let alone fund—what dance creation truly requires. This dearth of support castrates what would otherwise be a funnel to the top of the industry.
So when a gallerist or perhaps an artist decides to involve dance in a work—or even an event—they often do so without a full understanding of the medium’s needs. It’s understandable. On the surface, it seems as though a trained dancer would be able to plug movement easily into any context, to create something to match the exhibition, to complement the event. Even if there’s a modicum of truth in that assumption, it does not consider the rigor and monumental needs of meaningful dance work.
The art form ends up as aestheticized ambiance, an intellectual party favor, a distraction from more serious artistic pursuits, added to make the event feel more interesting, more performatively artistic. Or movement-based performance is inserted into a space without any deeper consideration of the works on the walls (or the ceiling or the floor)—meant to animate a static exhibition without any true relationship to the conceptual body of the show. A hand hired to allow an artsy crowd to confirm its multidimensional image of itself. The hierarchy of cultural capital is made clear: visual art as a commercial commodity towers, while dance, with its elusive form and limited marketability, becomes the sideshow.
CARVALHO’s series is a rare instance where both art forms stand solidly on their own. Echoes on the Wall and Pareidolia, rather than being decorative, cast a dye upon and ultimately change one another. And when the piece is over and the dancers leave the stage—or the room, in this case—their movement hangs in the air, joining the panels. It is clear that the elements of the performance have merged in a tantric entanglement. And we, the viewers, are left with a different relationship to the artwork, which has now returned to being a company of ten.
