Silent Collisions Traveling Installation

Dancers and architecture interact in a process of reciprocal exchanges: the dancers can initiate transformations of the space, and the kinetic space can in turn initiate the complex movements of the dancers’ bodies. Space and dancer become singular in this four-dimensional space of fixed and kinetic levels, breaks, inclined planes, and undulations—all of which transform at varying rates over time.

The stage structure provides choreographer Frédéric Flamand the tool to operate on the performance environment, to choreograph not only the dancers, but also the space. Upon visiting our exhibition at the Netherlands Institute of Architecture (NAI), Flamand sensed a connection between our interests and his “concern of confronting dance with an architecture of transformation and metamorphoses.” Both the title of Silent Collisions and its architectonic concept are siblings of our NAI installation, which, over the course of an hour, transformed dramatically at a nearly imperceptible pace.

Italo Calvino’s text Invisible Cities serves as a program for our concepts, an initiator of ideas about movement and spatial configurations. As a formal and temporal symmetry device, the structure starts and ends as a platonic form—a cube. Throughout the performance, the planes of the cube fold up or down to animate the environment. One specific city from each of Calvino’s eleven archetypes inspires a dance piece, which occurs amid a unique configuration of the architecture on stage. For example, the configuration for Cities and the Sky—Eudoxia derives from Calvino’s description of the city, “which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, [where] a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city’s true form.” The stage structure opens up completely, making way for the projection of an imaginary carpet on the ground. Traces of filmed dancers interact with the living, dancing bodies; speed and change dictate the rhythm of the city and its inhabitants.

The dancers’ movements in this environment of perpetual motion reflect the relationship of the individuals to their environment in the contemporary city. In Silent Collisions, as in the real city, the individual experiences built space through a network of chance encounters, the rhythm and pace of travel, shifting frames, evolving reflections, and perpetual human interventions.

Dancers and architecture interact in a process of reciprocal exchanges: the dancers can initiate transformations of the space, and the kinetic space can in turn initiate the complex movements of the dancers’ bodies. Space and dancer become singular in this four-dimensional space of fixed and kinetic levels, breaks, inclined planes, and undulations—all of which transform at varying rates over time.

The stage structure provides choreographer Frédéric Flamand the tool to operate on the performance environment, to choreograph not only the dancers, but also the space. Upon visiting our exhibition at the Netherlands Institute of Architecture (NAI), Flamand sensed a connection between our interests and his “concern of confronting dance with an architecture of transformation and metamorphoses.” Both the title of Silent Collisions and its architectonic concept are siblings of our NAI installation, which, over the course of an hour, transformed dramatically at a nearly imperceptible pace.

Italo Calvino’s text Invisible Cities serves as a program for our concepts, an initiator of ideas about movement and spatial configurations. As a formal and temporal symmetry device, the structure starts and ends as a platonic form—a cube. Throughout the performance, the planes of the cube fold up or down to animate the environment. One specific city from each of Calvino’s eleven archetypes inspires a dance piece, which occurs amid a unique configuration of the architecture on stage. For example, the configuration for Cities and the Sky—Eudoxia derives from Calvino’s description of the city, “which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, [where] a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city’s true form.” The stage structure opens up completely, making way for the projection of an imaginary carpet on the ground. Traces of filmed dancers interact with the living, dancing bodies; speed and change dictate the rhythm of the city and its inhabitants.

The dancers’ movements in this environment of perpetual motion reflect the relationship of the individuals to their environment in the contemporary city. In Silent Collisions, as in the real city, the individual experiences built space through a network of chance encounters, the rhythm and pace of travel, shifting frames, evolving reflections, and perpetual human interventions.