Moving art, painting by dance to be sold at Eclectic
The audience was called to a night at Bukowskis. Nobody knew what was going to happen, other than an announcement of a collaboration between Bukowskis and the Royal Opera. Paintings to be sold during the spring sales are lining the walls in the room facing Berzelii Park, attentive guests are chatting over a glass of wine. There's a speech about the beauty of mixing disciplines in art. People politely listen, but when the speaker finishes, the feeling of anticipation changes to impatience. When will something happen, and where?
Suddenly, barely audible at first, cutting through the sound of chatter, there is music.
Everything stops. Three couples, who up until now has seemed to be part of the audience, emerges and begin to dance a piece that soon describes a not entirely harmonious relationship. The dancers sometimes move away from each other, sometimes struggle in each others arms and then - a moment of tenderness. When the music changes to Arvo Pärt's Für Alina, something happens that makes the whole room hold it's breath. The man and woman at the end of one room, dressed completely in white, dip their fingers in paint and through the movement of dance, sweeping lines of red, blue and yellow appear on the wall. It seems that the painting is made, not by hands touching the wall, but through a reflection of the dancer's condition. In the concurrence of the appellant tones, the bodies of the dancers and us, the observers. The room transforms to the place of a magical ritual.
Choreographer Joakim Stephenson was given the task to create a performance for this evening and used the room as a starting point as well as the ambiance and the audience. He created six personalities in his dancers. The paint became the seventh participant in the dance. The story that evolved during eight minutes is about three couples (or is it just one couple in three versions?) that struggle under the pressure of their love and against how the ease has turned to battle, questions about integrity, abandonment and anger. At the end the man and woman reconcile, not in a passionate embrace, but the balance is restored for the time being. The couple leaves the room and all that is left on the wall is a wild and pulsating heart in blue, red and yellow.
The colour is a cornerstone for creativity. What came first? The desire to feel the smoothness of the clay as you smear it onto the rock, hearing the whispering sound of the beach when a stick draws lines in the wet sand on the shores edge? Or was it the desire to create something new, with the end result in mind, a painting, a sculpture, that came first? Will we ever know? But in Moving Art, at least the connection between bodies in movement and creation become perfectly clear.
The painting is to be auctioned off during the Eclectic sale, March 15 - 16 for the benefit of dance and opera.