This may just be the strangest combination of art and dance that I have ever seen. Having only dabbled in each of those fields, it’s not surprising that this is the strangest thing I’ve seen so far. The Dance Theater Workshop of NYC has invited artist and dancer Tony Orrico to decorate the walls of their lobby in their Chelsea theater. Tony Orrico is not going to paint a pretty mural for them. Instead, he is using only “bilateral movements” and “the span of his arms” to create a charcoal sketch in the lobby.
Read a little about the project here.
Also, the Dance Theater Workshop of NYC is offering a live stream of Tony Orrico in progress.
Watch him work between 5 and 9pm on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday
You can also see past videos of him at work at that link^
Has anyone seen anyplace else a mixture of dance and art like this? If so I’d like to see it. As for now though, I think Tony Orrico is giving us a whole new meaning of abstract art.
Tony Orrico at work
There are other examples of artists using their own bodies or the bodies of others as part of the art work. I will have to do some searching to find links, but I remember seeing the following:
The artist using her long hair to paint the floor of a gallery.
A female artist using her naked body as a paint brush to create images.
Artists using live models (dancers?), covered in paint and “installed” on the wall.
Painted Japanese dance troupe, hanging from a bridge in an outdoor “performance.”
This particular example is different because it involves the symmetry of the right and left hand of the artist, and if you watch some of the video, he does seem to involve a kind of “dancerly” aspect in the way he moves his body to create the images of his drawing. And the image is not “perfectly” symmetrical, any more than a person’s body is perfectly symmetrical. Interesting post.