When dance reflects art
Stunning dance piece is an homage to stained glass artwork
From Brueghel to Degas to Avedon, countless visual artists have been inspired by dance and dancers. The perfect, malleable bodies, combined with the challenge of capturing movement, rhythm, musicality, and charisma in a static image, have been like catnip to painters, sculptors and photographers, from the ancient Greeks to today.
The mirror doesn’t get turned the other way as often. But when dance gives a pulse to a work of art, faithfully conveying its spirit as well as its form, the results can be breathtaking.
For its 35th anniversary in 2012, Chicago’s eminent Hubbard Street Dance invited resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo to create the company’s first full-length work. Digging for ideas, the then 30-year-old Madrid native began investigating other significant Chicago events from 1977, the year Hubbard Street was founded. He stumbled on Marc Chagall’s America Windows, a huge stained glass triptych commissioned for the U.S. Bicentennial and now hanging in the Chicago Art Institute.
Cerrudo had found his muse. His One Thousand Pieces premièred in Chicago that anniversary season to reviews that choreographers twice his age would kill for, with usually stony critics gushing words such as “genius” and “legend.”
“My work doesn’t try to show the Chagall windows exactly,” he explains over the phone in his purring Madrileno accent. “For me, it’s more about the emotion I felt when I looked at the windows. At first, you know, I was a bit obsessed. I’d go look at the windows almost every day, trying to find a way to work the images into dance. Then I stopped. I had to stop looking at them and rely on my memory and my feeling instead.”
One Thousand Pieces is set to music by Philip Glass, a cheeky bit of punning on Cerrudo’s part. The work unfolds against a backdrop of deep, inky blue, the dominant colour in Chagall’s stained glass. All the dancers wear the same midnight shade.
“That blue is one of the only things I took literally from Chagall,” Cerrudo says. “The rest is more abstract. (Lighting designer) Michael Korsch did an amazing job. Everything looks really transparent.” Like light shining through glass.
At about 90 minutes, One Thousand Pieces is Cerrudo’s longest work. Graduating from shorter forms to full length was intimidating, he says.
“I have a short attention span myself, so I didn’t want to bore the audience. It was a challenge, but I think I succeeded.
“As an audience member, I’m kind of lazy. I don’t enjoy it when a choreographer shows me something and I have to guess what he meant. If I’m trying to tell a story and you don’t understand, then I’ve failed. But if you see something in my work that I never thought about or noticed before, that’s very valid. Actually, I love it when that happens.”