From The Temple

The Prelude Projects Fund presents From the Temple, featuring all female contributors :: Paris-based visual artists Pinar Demirdag and Viola Renate (of Pinar&Viola) in collaboration Althea Dance Company and Dorothea Garland. Known internationally for their indulgent visuals, Demirdag and Renate offer a destabilizing installation in which two new dance works will be performed and viewed in the round. From the Temple is a presentation that seeks to accentuate the female artist’s distinct voice while considering and signaling where these two disciplines can go together. 

In a Neo-Surrealist pattern that absorbs the vertical and the horizontal, the dynamic and the static, Demirdag and Renate invite entry to an all-consuming space of aesthetic inquiry and play, with walls of glazed eyes, knowing grins and columns of pearls, set against a backdrop of oscillating palms. The installation is an enclosed space that the viewer must make the decision to enter, thus leaving the rational everyday for the transformative unconscious of the artists. Brought to life in a way suited to the spirit of our age, the pattern speaks to the idea of the ancient Roman sacred spring that promised to revitalize the arts and societies. It is about rebirth and renewal. It confronts the senses while signifying something high. It is wild and yet subject to eternal ways.

From the Temple suggests the transcendence of something high and making it visible, and here, the role of the dancer is center in these pursuits. In the limbs of the dancer, in a field of visual extravagance, instinctual life is laid bare. Historically in the visual arts, the dancer has been a metaphor for the rupture from a stifling old order, or a climate of alienation. The female dancer speaks to something pure and intuitive – a figure that represents nature and feeling merging, a fusing of the physical and the spiritual. 

The new choreographic works complete the total. With no set orientation, like the pattern that encircles and takes in both viewer and dancer, the stage can be viewed from any angle. Each piece demonstrates its choreographer’s singular movement vocabulary. Bautista’s work will open, imparting a sense of immediacy; Garland’s will close the evening in a stylistic language more removed, more of another realm.