CURRENT EXHIBITION

Dance with Camera

September 11, 2009—March 21, 2010

Dance With Camera is an exhibition and a screening program that explores a crossover between artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features art works in film, video, and still photography that exemplify the ways dance has compelled visual artists to record bodies moving in time and space. Screenings elaborate the show’s theme with iconic dance films, ranging from Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood musicals to Maya Deren’s avant-garde films. Dance With Camera, on view September 11, 2009-March 21, 2010, in ICA’s first floor gallery, spans seventy years of art and film, and features over thirty artists and filmmakers between its exhibition and
screening program. 

The art works in Dance With Camera show the camera lens as not merely a recording device, but stage and audience simultaneously. The camera creates a unique space for dance. In some instances, choreography is created for the specific space of the camera; in others it is created in editing. The camera, unlike the stage, allows close-ups that bring us near the performer. Editing is used to compress time and create structure, and
even to transform relatively static performers into dancers. Still photography freezes time while also expanding the notion of dance as time-based. Dance itself is a mode to explore broader themes of narrative, structure, metaphor and abstraction. 

Dance With Camera begins in the 1960s with seminal works by Bruce Conner and Bruce Nauman. Conner’s prototypical BREAKAWAY (1966) prefigured music videos, and threads through the recent work of robbinschilds. Early video artists of the 1970s took up dance as a subject, seen in works such as Eleanor Antin’s narrative ballet-themed works, and Charles Atlas’ first works with Merce Cunningham. The camera’s role as
documentarian characterizes contemporary works by Mike Kelley, Kelly Nipper, Tacita Dean, and Elad Lassry, among others. Works by Oliver Herring and Flora Wiegmann use dynamic camera views and kinetic editing to make vibrant videos of dancers, and nondancers. The drama intrinsic to stylized, physical movement is captured by Luis Jacob, Joachim Koester and Uri Tzaig. 

In the galleries:

Eleanor Antin, Charles Atlas, Bruce Conner, Tacita Dean, Oliver Herring, Luis Jacob, Mike Kelley, Joachim Koester, Elad Lassry, Bruce Nauman, Kelly Nipper, A.L. Steiner, AJ Blandford and robbinschilds, Uri Tzaig, Flora Wiegmann, and Christopher Williams. 

Visit Museum