“Beneath the threshold of perception”. Danza e fotografia live in "Held", di Lois Greenfield e Australian Dance Theatre

Arianna Novaga

doi:10.6092/issn.2036-1599/8717

Authors

Arianna Novaga
Arianna Novaga, photographer and scholar in photography. She is graduated in Architecture at the IUAV, Venice, and obtained a PHD at the Inter-University Doctoral School of the Cà Foscari University, IUAV and University of Verona, with the thesis Role of photography on the scene of contemporary research theater. Between document and intermediality. From many years she is researching the relationship between photography, theater and performing arts, a subject about she has written by and published on several occasions. She has also taken part in various conferences on the same subject in Italy and France. She published photographs on numerous books and magazines and she is a curator for several exhibitions in Italy and abroad. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at the IUSVE University in Verona and Venice. She is the Artistic Director of Hodgepodge Imagezine.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-1599/8717

Abstract

In Held (2004), a dance performance by the Australian Dance Theater with the American Lois Greenfield, for the first time the figure of a photographer is active on the stage in the role of intermediary between audience and choreographic gesture. Interacting instantly with static space and moving body, live photographies taken during the performance - reported to the public in real time - extrapolates narrative fragments that suspend the flow of action while it continues to happen. Held also seems to want to retrace, through the expedient of the dance, some salient circumstances of a Twentieth Century history of photography: from the use of the snapshot, which deifies imperceptible throb to the naked eye, to the experiment of strobophotography, which dissects the action revealing the trajectory of the gesture, up to the surrealist photo, with his attempt to transfigure the contours of the body.