Framing Time (World premiere )
White light Festival Lincoln Center 1-2 November 2018 Baryshnikov Arts Center Jerome Robbins Theater
In 2003, Cesc Gelabert created the solo In a Landscape to be performed by the company White Oak Dance Project, founded by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris in 1990. Now, the choreographer is back to collaborate with Baryshnikov Productions in a piece where he is the only dancer. Or maybe not, as in this choreography the artist evolves within a calm almost absent sound of the piano composition Triadic Memories by Morton Feldman, and movement and music are as much the protagonists as the lighting itself. In fact, an essential part of the show is built out of light, color and poetry. It all started in 2015, when the pianist Pedja Muzijevic asked the set and lighting designer Burke Brown to stage a concert recital so that Feldman could be interpreted. Morton Feldman is considered a pioneer composer of minimalism and a musician with clear visual references in abstract painting. Brown and Muzijevic’s collaboration has ever since evolved thanks to Gelabert, who has contributed to the performance not only with movement, as precise as enigmatic and almost mystical, but also with a series of sculptural elements as part of the choreography. Framing Time premiered last fall in New York.
A quietly thrilling evening of music, movement, and light unfolds within the hushed, meditative sound world of Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories. Vividly rendered by pianist Pedja Muzijevic, the shifting colors and elastic tempos of Feldman’s painterly music are transformed into movement with “corporeal magic” (Guardian, U.K.) by choreographer and dancer Cesc Gelabert.
