Terpsichore and the architects: 'I have a deep sense of my body's architecture … the skeleton', said choreographer Trisha Brown in her prelude to the Royal Academy Forum which brought the worlds of dance and architecture together. In these pages Jeremy Melvin summarizes contributions, from a classicist, two architects, three choreographers and artist David Ward

DW Do you feel your work is repeatable?

SD Dance is an ephemeral art form. The movement inhabits the air in front of you for the split second it takes. The thought of repeating it endlessly is less exciting than making that one glimmer particular and precious. I find that rarity special and extraordinary.

But one reason why dance has less resonance than music or art is that we don't have a sturdy history. Until film and photography, dance lived through music or literature written about it. From my point of view no performance should be like another. Revisiting a work for performance each day should be a chance to go through the piece with all the accuracy that one's experience can bring to it, but with a totally open plan about what it might produce. I am trying to devise a way of having a blueprint of ideas, structures and forms, that could convey what the original cast went through that another cast could experience, though they may arrive in a different way.

DW The particularity of one moment in a dance can appear to change the fixed characteristics of a space. The last time I saw Merce Cunningham perform with his company, he galvanized the entire volume of the theatre. Moving stiffly in a diagonal line from back right to front left, he made me feel as if the performance was no longer 'over there'; we inhabited the same space.

COPYRIGHT 2004 EMAP Architecture
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group