Fluid Adagio
Salt Lake City, Utah / 2010
with Seohong Min, Junho Cho, and Dongcheol Yan
Ballet dancers tell stories through performative gestures in a choreographed sequence of movement. Through an architecture of dance, their bodies negotiate both the structure and feeling of music—reconstructing them in space though a kinetic tension/compression dynamic between themselves and their audience.
Fluid Adagio choreographs the site as a mediating field in which the systematic performance of ballet intertwines with the improvisational performance of urbanity. Operating within and regulated by an organizational grid, furniture prototypes, ballet barres, and groundscape trigger specific actions in specific places [themselves performing programmatically], while mirrored planes reflect these actions back onto themselves—transposing performer and spectator; viewer and viewed; object and field; ground and sky; foreground and background. As the public engages the urban furniture at grid intersections [as they dance with them], ballet dancers engage the public through site specific, improvisational performance in between them.
Fluid Adagio simultaneously frames and stages a gradient of public performance.