Just Dance

All was quiet on Yale’s Cross Campus. A student worked on her laptop, taking advantage of the last whispers of summer still in the air as she typed out one of her first papers. A group of runners passed, urging each other on once or twice as they scaled the stairs by Sterling Library. Someone’s phone went off on one of the benches that surround the area, sending a quick pulse of light into the air.

Then, as if a great invisible hand had finally pressed the right button, a triptych of hulking screens sprang to life, a dancer appearing on each of their endlessly black backgrounds. As if coordinated, the three began to move, simultaneously aware and unaware of each other, tumbling through the darkness to find their feet.

Very slowly, that is.

Thus marked the beginning of Slow Dancing, a week-long, larger-than-life video installation by New York based photographer David Michalek that explores the nuances, freedoms, and boundaries of human movement, time and gesture. From now through Tuesday, it will be running ​“as a gift to the New Haven community” from the Institute of Sacred Music from 8 – 11 every night on Cross Campus, accessible from Wall Street or Elm Street.

Last year, ISM displayed Michalek’s 14 Stations, a series of photographs of people transitioning out of homelessness, at its Gallery of Sacred Arts on Prospect Street. Slow Dancing takes another step in exploring spirituality within an interdisciplinary and artistic context.

At its most basic Slow Dancing is an exercise in close looking, which quickly becomes an exercise in wonderment. In stunning, über slowed down portraits of 43 dancers, the labor and intricacy of movement are revealed repeatedly: muscles accentuate and ripple, heads appear and disappear into extremities, contorted at near-nonhuman levels, bodies fold, fall and spring triumphantly. The absence of music, part of Michalek’s artistic vision for the project, seems particularly important in this respect: the orchestrations of the dancers’ bodies take over, forming a polyphony as they are viewed together. 

It does not stop there. As bodies steadily furl and unfurl, twist and turn, stretch and leap on the screens, the installation becomes part public art part multimedia performance, bridging a gap between artistic intent and public accessibility.

By slowing the dancers down and placing them in randomly selected trios, Michalek has also been able to take big, abstract, too-often academicized concepts and turn them over to a different medium.

Like dis/ability, personified in Crutchmaster Bill Shannon​’s piece. When Shannon begins slumped on crutches, the audience at large does not know what to expect. By the end of the movement, they are watching him spin wildly, breaking the traditional barriers of the device by turning its use on its head.

Or the boundaries created by culture, gender and sexuality. Throughout the films, viewers’ notions of normalcy are repeatedly challenged as they come face-to-face – or face-to-body – with performers of different genders and sexualities, races, cultures and body types. Not to mention styles of dance. Long gone are the pretensions of the Bolshoi Ballet or a contested rigidity of form, replaced with a panoply of bodies that recount, over three soundless hours, everything that is still graceful about democracy. 

“I wanted to suggest all-inclusivity, so that not only were many different types of dance languages and styles … represented, but also I wanted a great range of ages to e represented, many different ethnicities … people who were differently gendered to be represented, different body shapes … no limitations,” he explained in a video on making the installation, above.

As an artistic device, the triptych format is perfect for this, drawing on an art historical and filmic tradition of separate but codependent parts. On a surface level, the dancers do not need each other to exist; to the contrary, each of their 10ish minute performances are remarkably solitary and self-sufficient, and draw great emotional power from being so. And yet that artifice can only travel so far: by virtue of their proximity to each other, a visual conversation between them – and between viewers – is inevitable.

On conceiving of and making the videos, Michalek explained in a director’s statement that his love of and fascination with dance as a fine art form (he is married to NYCB dancer Wendy Whelan ) was a driving force behind the project:

“One impulse was clear. I love dance. I love watching it. I love what dancers do, who they are, and what they stand for. Dance is an underappreciated art form … This led me to the idea of making a visual statement centered on celebrating dance — but not limited to any one kind of dance — to try to capture the ​“essence” of dance in a different medium.”

This is perhaps where Michalek finds his greatest artistic momentum. As it evolves into a three hour, 43 dancer, silent conversation. Slow Dancing urges its audience to think critically about the exquisite, baffling task of owning a body and making it move.

Don’t concentrate too hard about the poetry of it, or it might overwhelm you. Just dance.