Get an inside look into the contemporary performance world of Core Dance this month as the ensemble streams a new body of work on their studio’s front windows on the Decatur Square.
The screen dance project “inside: out – The Collection,” directed and choreographed by Core Dance artistic director Sue Schroeder, features the work of 2021 resident artists and guest artists at the National Gallery Prague.
Schroeder joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to talk about the collaborative project.
Interview highlights follow below.
How dance film projections kept Core visible in recent challenging years:
“We have these beautiful storefront windows. So, many years ago, I finally got photos, large-scale photos up there, and then photos are expensive to replace. So I was thinking, ‘Wow, we have all this great footage that belongs to Core. I wonder if we could figure out how to project,'” recalled Schroeder. “We got that all up and running prior to the pandemic, and we put up our first film, which was, we call it ‘inside: out.’ It was bringing coursework from inside the studio out to the public, the public eye, and then we all know what happened shortly after that – COVID happened. And we were so grateful that we still had a way to present both our work and the work of other artists through this format of large-scale screens.”
“Seeing it large-scale on the front of our building is compelling in another way. And I think we’re learning, all of us in the art world and then many other parts of the, I guess, business community, COVID has changed things. And so allowing people the flexibility to come when they can, it feels accessible. It’s free, so there’s no price barrier. And so if I can bring the world to people, I love it. It just gives great meaning to the work I’m doing out in the world.”
Joining Czech choreographers to bring museum art to life through dance:
“I have a long history of working in museums, and what’s unique about what I do is, I study and research the actual artwork, the visual artwork, the visual artist, or the curatorial practice of the exhibition, if it’s multiple artists,” said Schroeder. “I have been asked over the years… to embody the work in the physical. So I don’t respond, ‘Oh, I like this work, and this is what it makes me feel, how it makes me feel like moving.’ Instead, you’re going to see a physical manifestation of the two- or three-dimensional piece of art, and museums get super excited that this is a way for audiences to engage with the work on a very interesting and deeper level, the kinesthetic.”
“I chose Czech artists for all of the work. The same year that I chose the work, I was on a project similar with Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas for the women’s right to vote anniversary, and so I was really interested in images of women in the work…. There were two large-scale paintings on the wall, and in between was [Auguste] Rodin’s ‘Martyr’ laying there on a pedestal, and I couldn’t not address the fact that large piece of sculpture was sitting between these two paintings, and so that was the one non-Czech… that was in the exhibition.”
On the experience of creating dance for film rather than a live audience:
“[Videographer Amador Artiga] and I had become artistic collaborators, as opposed to him documenting the nature of the work, which has a different sensibility in a different field, and we stayed in relation the whole shoot, with most of the videographers and filmmakers I work with on their shoulder, looking at at images and shots,” recounted Schroeder. “And then after, it’s a collaborative process through the editing…. In the gallery, each artist presented their work with different sound scores. It felt important to unify this version of the actual project, the collection, the video installation, with a unifying sound.”
Core Dance’s film project “inside: out – The Collection” screens nightly on their studio front windows in Decatur, and is also available to view online at https://www.coredance.org/inside-out.
