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by Christabel Stewart .

Historic Performaces at Documenta 12

If you happen to be making a summer pilgrimage to Documenta this weekend you will have a rare chance to see the celebrated Yvonne Rainer perform one of her dance pieces at the Theater im Fridericianum, in Kassel. Rainer's career is viewed as emblematic of the preoccupations of the American avant-garde -the aesthetics of minimalism and the performance ideas of John Cage being central tenets- until later including minimalist-influenced films into these performances, making them early multi-media experiments. Both Documenta presentations: 'RoS Indexical' and 'AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M.' are being performed as a co-production with New York's performance biennale Performa. The first is a reworking of the controversial premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps - when performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1913. The second borrows from Balanchine/Stravinsky's classical ballet Agon as produced in 1957, as an opportunity to analyse, pay homage to, and parody such a classic dance model.

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  • GalileosUniverse
    06:30 21 Aug 2007
    DOCUMENTA ....absolutely fantastic !....A MUST....A MUST !
    Quote fromThe leitmotifs:
    ' Three questions posed for art but also for its public '
    To initiate such a productive exchange, the documenta poses three questions for art, and also for its public: Is humanity able to recognise a common horizon beyond all differences? Is art the medium for this knowledge? What is to be done, what do we have to learn in order to cope intellectually and spiritually with globalisation? Is that a question of aesthetic education and cultivation? What constitutes life, when everything is subtracted which does not belong essentially to life? Does art help us to penetrate to what is essential?
    Quote from Leitmotifs.....Is modernity our antiquity ?
    :....." no one really knows if modernity is dead or alive. It seems to be in ruins after the totalitarian catastrophes of the 20th century (the very same catastrophes to which it somehow gave rise). It seems utterly compromised by the brutally partial application of its universal demands (libert,egalite, fraternite) or by the simple fact that modernity and coloniality went, and probably still go, hand in hand. Still, people's imaginations are full of modernity's visions and forms (and I mean not only Bauhaus but also arch-modernist mind-sets transformed into contemporary catchwords like identity or culture. In short, it seems that we are both outside and inside modernity, both repelled by its deadly violence and seduced by its most immodest aspiration or potential: that there might, after all, be a common planetary horizon for all the living and the dead....."
    THANKS !.....SHOW studio !!