ShaLeigh Dance Works was honored to contribute to this community project by Michael Kliën of Duke’s Dance Program. About 100 participants stepped into this work of art to discover space to breathe, freedom from screens, a return to their bodies, and a retreat into strangeness. Groups gathered in the gallery for four days, six to 10 hours per day. Kliën previously presented versions of PARLIAMENT in Amsterdam, Greece, Brussels, London and New York.
“Since his early 20’s Kliën has been engaged in fundamentally deconstructing our civilization’s assumptions on choreography, dance and culture. He set out to redevelop choreography as an autonomous artistic discipline concerned with the workings and governance of patterns, dynamics and ecologies. In response to the urgency of our contemporary ecological situation, this new conception of choreography engages its social potential to pursue sustainable orders of human relations (Social Choreography). Choreography—as an Aesthetics of Change—assumes the creative practice of setting relations, or setting the conditions for new relations to emerge.” More information here http://michaelklien.com/onchoreography.html
“The way our culture has choreographed dance has always been reflective of the larger tendencies of how we, as a society, deal with the unknown, the unframable, the foreign, the spiritual and the animal. (…) Our premise must not be to constrain movement into a set pattern, but rather to provide a cradle for movement to find its own patterns—over and over again.” – Book of Recommendations
The Nasher Museum presented PARLIAMENT at Duke: A Pioneering Work of Situational Choreography and SDW was honored to join on its closing day, Saturday, March 10th, from 10am to 5pm at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.