AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Yvonne Rainer, David Michalek, FF Alumns, seek participants

The Body as Muscular Fact:
A project of Yvonne Rainer and David Michalek

The Body as Muscular Fact is an installation for three channels of video
projection and sound focusing on images of the human body moving in extreme
slow motion. Three translucent screens are suspended from the ceiling of a
large, dark open space. Images of the full-length human figure can be seen
projected on the screens, visible from both sides. It is not without
significance that all of the figures will be unclothed, nor is this merely
because clothes offer conventional concealment. More significantly, the nude
figures will be devoid of the usual trappings that signal social position
and taste, forcing us to find new ways to "read" social being.

Each of the figures will be set against a black field, all but for a ghostly
grid of white lines on the wall behind. The tableau will directly reference
the famous Eadweard Muybridge sequences of the human figure and animals in
motion created in the late 1880’s. Often referred to as a key figure in the
invention of motion picture, Muybridge created equipment to permit the
projection of transparencies made from his photographs of his animals in
motion. The projected images produced in his audience an illusion “as if
the living animal were moving.”

If those early films created the illusion of movement by stringing together
several dozen stills, this one will create the illusion of near stillness by
stringing together several thousand of them. Each film will be created by
recording seven seconds of movement at several thousand frames a second. The
resulting ten-minute films play back in hyper- slow motion.

In 1966, choreographer Yvonne Rainer created the now iconic dance-work, Trio
A (as part of a larger work called The Mind is a Muscle). As a steady stream
of motions performed without pause or inflection, Rainer’s Trio A
(italics) presented the body as Western theatrical dance never had before:
in its unadorned, physical facticity. The work is engendered by the use of
a task-like continuity that can be executed by both trained and untrained
performers. Thus can Trio A can be likened to Muybridge's earlier
investigations of everyday actions. For this project, Rainer will teach a
different section of her Trio A to each of the 45 subjects. The subjects
will then perform their sequence on a specially constructed stage (under
200,000 watts of light) to be filmed by David Michalek using a high-speed
camera. This aspect of the project is a follow-through to Michalek’s
previous work entitled, SlowDancing. For that work, Michalek filmed 45 great
dance artists for a mere 5 seconds at 3000 frames a second. When played
back, the resulting films stretch out to a glacially paced ten minutes. It
premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival as a large-scale work of public art
in 2007.
www.slowdancingfilms.com

The principal motivation for bringing the work of these three parties
together (Muybridge, Rainer, Michalek) is the idea of creating a serious
study of human movement for the 21st century. The project as a whole will
seek to update Muybridge, not only technologically, but socially/culturally
as well. If Rainer's preoccupation with everyday movement dovetails with
Muybridge's use of tasks, so too does Michalek’s work align with Muybridge’s
use of what was then the “state of the art” to record and portray the
motions of the body in a new way.

Anyone and everyone are welcome to submit. No body is too normal, or too
extreme for consideration. Of particular interest are families that show a
broad range of ages from young children to grandparents. The ultimate
selection will be in an effort to assemble as broad a spectrum of human
bodies as possible. Interested parties should email a brief letter
expressing your reason for interest and including an attached full-length
photo (preferably in a swimsuit) to:
davidcmichalek@gmail.com
whyrainer@gmail.com

from Franklin Furnace