exhibition
11/12/2021
Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab
»“The Rite of Spring” was an iconic work of the avant-garde movement which shocked the dance world in the early 20th century. Choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, it integrated Russian folklore with laboring bodies. The piece explored the enigmatic relationship between human and nature, depicting a pagan ritual where a group of elders sitting in a circle commanded a young girl to dance herself to death. “The Rite of Spring” has become one of the most iconic and influential works of dance history. For over a century, countless choreographers have been inspired to recreate their own versions of “The Rite of Spring,” an unfinished journey that has spanned modern humanism’s exploration of the Self, the Others, and the Community over the past hundred years. In 2014, Italian theater director Romeo Castellucci created a “non-human” version of “The Rite of Spring”. Using an automated factory hall absent of dancers as a metaphor, the work shows a future urban scenario with labors operated by machines, similar to present-day Amazon distribution centers, where robots are used to pick up goods and deliveries are carried out by drones. In this human-less performance, the absence of humans creates a unique heterogeneous space. A “state of being” is then prompted by the “that-has-been” of humans, which subsequently opens up thoughts on the technological body in the Digital Age.«