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

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.