Let’s Dance!

As soon as image recording techniques were invented, starting with cinema and later expanding to video, artists, dancers, and choreographers quickly embraced the realm of moving images. They utilized this medium to contextualize their performances, explore research hypotheses, and venture into uncharted territories of visual and sound experimentation. Furthermore, their contributions extended beyond mere utilization of moving images, as they played a pivotal role in enriching these domains. They contextualized these images within an expanded framework, essentially inventing an ‘art of perception’. 

Performance is not a specific artistic genre but rather serves as a catalyst that intersects with all fields of contemporary creation, encompassing a wide range of disciplines. Within this dynamic framework, performance swiftly evolved into a fertile ground for experimentation and critical exploration, allowing for alternative temporal approaches to artistic works. The aim is not to achieve a state of totality, but to synthesize the various artistic elements that are brought together.

As Claudia Triozzi points out, for an artist, performance entails not only transcending representation but also involves a departure from one’s own self. Furthermore, performance initiates an alternative utilization of time that de-subjectivizes gestures, actions, and situations. Additionally, performance also sets in motion a different use of time that de-subjectivizes gestures, acts, and situations, stripping them of their subjective nature. This is the performative cinema that a number of artists are truly inventing today: a cinema that literally and simultaneously ‘performs’ both its contents and its form, configuring unprecedented time loops. Moreover, these temporal constructions are elaborated from scores, sounds (in the musical sense of the term), as well as scores for gestures and attitudes, in order to shape experiences and forms of interpretation. As a result, they bring the works to a boundary that blurs the distinctions between music, cinema, and dance.

The films here, chosen from the collection of works of the National Center for Visual Arts (CNAP), fall within this perspective. Heir to the national collection from the French Revolution, the CNAP collection comprises over one hundred thousand works, a part of which is on deposit in French museums. This collection has been able to expand to encompass new trends in contemporary art. The Let’s Dance! Proposal, conceived by Pascale Cassagnau for the Fuso Festival, presents a selection of video works from the CNAP collection that explore the intersections of dance, performance, and music.

This initiative testifies to the works’ capacity to shape an “art of the spectator.”