Roof Piece Installation

Three contiguous screens with projections of 2K video from 16mm films from the 1973 performance July 1, 1973 (Bordeaux Centre of Contemporary Art, France, 2018)

The installation is projecting three films that were shot in 1973 to chronicle the performance. Those 32 minutes 16mm films were scanned in 2 K video in 2017 permitting three projected moving images to be projected at least life size for the solo dancer on screen left and same for screen right.

When you are close to one screen you feel the dancer is next to you, but if you pull back at a distance, in a single angle of vision you see the three screens and can compare the difference between the movement sent from the head of the line and its reception less than two minutes later to the end of the line. That permits you to understand the distortion or the absence of it depending of the movement in relation to the distance travelled. Dancers are spread out one per street block and were positioned to be able to move and see the dancer before them and be seen by the dancer following them. Nobody could see all the dancers from one position and at most you could see 5 dancers on those Soho roofs in July 1973.

Roof Piece Slide Show:

The three screens start at left with Trisha Brown, the choreographer and director of the performance on screen left, who initiates the movement in the first 15 minutes of the performance to a center view showing the skyline with two dancers and Carmen Beuchat on screen right that is at the end of the line. The tempo isseen in the synchronization of the middle point of the performance when the dancer on screen left finishes initiating the movement and a pause permits all the dancers to reverse their positions to see the dancer from screen right to initiate the transmission of the movement back to the origin.

After 15 minutes of the dance Trisha Brown kneels and everybody kneels in turn until Carmen Beuchat makes a brief pause, which permit each dancers to turn 180 degrees to face Carmen's direction so they can see what she does when she starts initiating the remaining 15 minutes for the dance.

The work to be experienced fully as a film installation needs for the viewer to be able to be very close to one screen as well as to be far away to get the 3 images interacting in one single look. The editing and synchronization of the 3 screens is now possible because of new software that permits to route the 3 screens projecting 2 K video from one computer.

The installation plays in loop of about 32 minutes.

Special thanks to Anne Sophie Dunant who curated the show at Bordeaux Centre of Contemporary Art, France in late March and early April 2018.