What a body can do

Kirsten Maar
2015 Stedelijk studies  
When I enter the apartment on the first floor in Berlin Schöneberg, where the Musée de la danse is announced to take place, Rabih Mroué welcomes me and the others visitors. At the very first room, I encounter a workshop situation in which Shelley Senter, former dancer with Trisha Brown (one of the icons of postmodern dance) tries to teach some phrases of Primary Group Accumulation, a piece from 1973, to Claire Bishop, art historian and critic of relational and participatory aesthetics. Both are
more » ... lying on the floor, and we are joining them. Primary Group Accumulation was the third piece set by the mathematical structure of accumulation, following the principle of a children's game: A, AB, ABC, ABCD—repeating and adding one new element of movement after each repetition. Four dancers performed rotations and bending of the joints in unison; the easier and more everyday it looks, the harder it is to execute the movement in exact unison, with the right timing. The piece precisely negotiates the tension between the relatively simple structure, the non-virtuosic movement, and its interpretation—between "geometric order and corporal imprecision."
doi:10.54533/stedstud.vol003.art17 fatcat:mjaxmkafezfrve4g3hvsfzbbde