Cabinet (2015)

Performance

duration: 25 minutes

Choreography and performance: Biba Bell

Sound: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe

Cabinet is a performance made exclusively for and within The Cranbrook Art Museum's Wunderkammer, Hall of Wonders, exhibition. The dancer begins and ends in Degas' classic dancerly pose, installed as a curiosity within the exhibition's vast architecture of display that contains painting and sculpture, furniture, taxidermy, archeological objects, scientific scores and taxonomy, photographs, and textiles. The dance performs the journey through, around, and by the exhibition. Bisecting the space between object and viewer, the dance traces the edges of this relation, taking time to experience the assignation in place and time of specific works and creating a web of exchange, circulation, and collision between these spaces. In real time, the dancer is revealed as a material, fleshly, sonic, affective medium through which the audience might gain access to the impossible labor of the objet d'art as it works to exist in and unto itself. The performance climaxes with the shock of a deep, bodily scream that breaks through the visual field supported by the traditionally mute dancer and is echoed across the hall by Bell on one side and Lowe on the other.

Curated by Laura Mott at Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI