New language of the body for a ballet… a dazzling one
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British choreographer Wayne McGregor and Danish visual artist Olafur Eliasson have invented new choreographic languages by combining visual art and scientific technology in the ballet Tree of Codes, recently performed at the Paris Opera.
The theme is drawn from the American novel The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (Penguin, 1977), in which the author, much as Raymond Queneau did in 1961 with his collection Cent mille milliards de poèmes, cut up the book to pull out words and phrases that take on a different meaning when read in isolation. The set for this choreography draws heavily on the kind of geometric configurations Eliasson loves: pencils of circles, parallels and perpendiculars, kaleidoscopic images…
Enough to satisfy a geometer's eye, assuming it isn't too dazzled by the violence of the lighting effects.
Leonardo da Vinci, dancing
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Having recently toured the south of France, the Spanish company Aracaladanza, which had already drawn on the work of Joan Miró, this time takes its inspiration from the work of Leonardo da Vinci. In its show Vuelos, it thus presents a whole series of scenes based on drawings and sketches by the Florentine artist, especially those that, as the show's title indicates, relate to the flying objects invented by the great Leonardo.
