Exhibition

City of Abstracts

William Forsythe (Germany, USA)

Galata Greek Primary School

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“Choreography is a curious and deceptive term. The word itself, like the processes it describes, is elusive, agile, and maddeningly unmanageable… Choreography and dancing are two distinct and very different practices. In the case that choreography and dance coincide, choreography often serves as a channel for the desire to dance. One could easily assume that the substance of choreographic thought resided exclusively in the body. But is it possible for choreography to generate autonomous expressions of its principles, a choreographic object, without the body? … What else, besides the body, could physical thinking look like? … Are we perhaps at the point in the evolution of choreography where a distinction between the establishment of its ideas and its traditional forms of enactment must be made?” –WF

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City of Abstracts, a video installation by a renowned choreographer, invites visitors to become the real-time designers of their own body. Their movements are tracked by a camera, processed live by software, and projected on a huge video wall as a kind of interactive mirror. Bodies stretch themselves into spiral forms and entangle with those of strangers, producing an ever-changing dance. The traditional definition of choreography and the familiar image of the body are destabilized.

• The development and international exhibition of Choreographic Objects by William Forsythe is made possible with the generous support of Susanne Klatten.