RHAPSODY OF EFFACEMENT: A CAVE DANCE

The performance is coming from the past and from the structures of culture: a reflection on how we build and erase art, meaning, history and memory. Velvet curtains reinforce the staging nature of everything that exists.

“As humanity, as well as individuals, there are the things, in our consciousness, that get forgotten. Yet, there is then this greater, more profound and severe lapse: the things we forget that were forgotten. And in that oblivion, they cease to exist.”

RHAPSODY OF EFFACEMENT: A CAVE DANCE

is a performance divided into two acts and the sixth in the “Performances To Become A Photograph” series, conducted by artist Sofia Borges since 2018.

(…) The performance is coming from the past and from the structures of culture: a reflection on how we build and erase art, meaning, history and memory. Velvet curtains reinforce the staging nature of everything that exists. Masks move to the front of the question, performances occur to investigate the nature of seeing, of remembering, of history, and their ongoing changes. The audience is observed by our liquid memories of past. A sense of tomorrow emerges from it. The present moment is an assemblage of long befores and their unknown afters”

In its different acts, the performance reflects about the past and about the future. The act proposed for this award is the second performance, Color Is Gesture, which turns toward the future.

Involving seven female dancers, a choreographer assistant, a musician, and visual artists, the performances took place in NYC in March and May 2024. In Color Is Gesture, what appear as blue masks are actually portraits of sculptures: large-scale black-and-white photographs cropped to resemble masks. First used black-and-white in Act One, the masks were painted blue for Act Two as a symbolic gesture of effacement.

The sculptures photographed were purposefully chosen from a wide variety of origins, periods, and archival contexts—some with extensive information, others with scarcely any. The only common characteristic among them was being kept and classified, for decades, under the same place—a historical cave: the museum.

For Rhapsody, all sculptures photographed were located in The Met Museum, but had never been together, as they were widely distributed across distinct classificatory rooms. This act of categorization and separation highlights their detachment from their original contexts and the historical dissection that defines their relevance.

From hundreds of sculptures photographed, 11 were selected based on their ability to convey a gaze. Regardless of how destroyed, conceptual, or minimal their expressions were, the chosen portraits had to be able to look back at their observer—the present "us."

The aim was to explore how the museological object relates to cultural memory and how facts relate to perspectivism.

Specifically, the project observes the processes of history and collective memory—solid yet fluid circumstances that are either effaced or reinforced—and how these processes dictate what is to be forgotten and what is to be remembered. Color Is Gesture departs from the symbolic effacement of photographic shadows with blue tempera. This shadow-effacement represents what is forever lost in memory, whether it concerns a fact, an image, a person, or an entire population or period. In Part Two, the photo-masks represented an erased past, and the goal was to propose an interaction between humanity’s past and the present “us” embodied by the female dancers. The portraits symbolize what we know of our past, while the abstract colors represent what is unknown about the future—a dance between history and the unfathomable.

The resulting photographs, film, and photo-masks are artworks in themselves, not mere documentation. Despite looking somehow surrealist, they depict what occurred, with no digital manipulation.

Initially, Act Two was planned as an interaction between the blue-effaced masks and small velvet paintings (depicting this abstract future). However, during the performance, an unpredictable momentum-coherence emerged, pushing the paintings out of the stage.

This left the group of dancers to interact only with themselves as a unity, left with nothing else but their togetherness, to literally solve whatever unknown they had coming from their bodies. Color Is Gesture became a radically unpredictable act of becoming.

Due to the complexity of Rhapsody Of Effacement: A Cave Dance, links are provided for a broader understanding of its acts:

Marble Sounds https://sofiaborges.carbonmade.com/projects/7273703

Color Is Gesture https://sofiaborges.carbonmade.com/projects/7274120