Let’s Dance ! Experimental Station

As early as the late 1950s, artists such as John Cage, Allan Kaprow, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles Olson were developing a truly transdisciplinary approach at the Black Mountain College, breaking down the boundaries between artistic fields and seeking to transcend traditional conceptions of art. Furthermore, all their aesthetic research and experimentation aimed to set aside the subject and the self, producing works that did not directly refer to a singular biography and freed themselves from the limits of the personal imagination. Performance is not an artistic genre but a catalyst that traverses all fields of contemporary creation conceived within its broader context. To perform is to construct shifts, hypotheses, and situations: this is the transdisciplinary condition of contemporary creation.

Thus, ever since the invention of the recording arts—first cinema and then video—artists, dancers, and choreographers have taken over the realm of moving images to put performances into perspective, to outline research hypotheses, and to open up new fields of visual and auditory experimentation. Conversely, they have helped enrich these fields by placing images within their broader context and by inventing an art of the gaze.

This is the performative cinema that a number of artists are truly inventing today: a cinema that literally “performs” both its content and its form, creating unprecedented temporal loops. Furthermore, these temporal constructions are developed from scores—sounds in the musical sense of the term, but also scores of gestures and attitudes—to model experiences and forms to be interpreted, thus taking the works to the boundaries between music, cinema, and dance. The films presented here, selected from the collection of works at the National Center for Visual Arts, fit into this perspective. They constitute portraits of the artist as an actor of his own making, drawing unprecedented temporal loops, often using the realm of dance as an experimental stage.

As the heir to the national collection created by the French Revolution, the CNAP’s collection comprises over 100,000 works, some of which are housed in French museums or loaned for exhibitions. It has successfully expanded to encompass new trends in contemporary art. The Let’s Dance! exhibition, conceived by Pascale Cassagnau, demonstrates the works’ ability to shape the art of the viewer.

Curator : Pascale Cassagnau, curator and head of collections