It Never Really Happened Part One (2014-2016)

DANCE / ARCHITECTURE

Performance, Installation, party, discussion

Duration: dance 45 minutes, event 2 hours

Mies van der Rohe apartment, The Pavilion, Lafayette Park, Detroit

It Never Really Happened is a dance performance set in the fifth-floor corner apartment of a 1958 Mies van der Rohe high-rise in Lafayette Park, Detroit. It offers a singular event for the public to experience dance, domesticity, and modernism's classic architecture. In the fashion of a cocktail party, the two-hour long event opens up a private space to a small audience (20-25 persons), exposing the apartment as a space of intimacy, visibility, and aestheticized leisure.

The choreography infiltrates the apartment, combining all attentions in the room to create a shared space of spectacle. Each performance of It Never Really Happened is a personalized secret that endures through its audience as a time capsule housed by memory. 

Organized as a diptych, the piece is performed at sunset during two seasons (Winter and Summer), in 2015 and 2016. Offering 8 performances per installment (16 performances total), they are organized around a different mood, architectural element, time of day, and seasonal color. Part one is a solo; part two a duet which moves into a group dance on the concrete parking lot outside, viewed birds-eye from the apartment above. The dance activates the classic modernism of Mies van der Rohe’s architectural treasure in Lafayette Park, highlighting the drama of day-to-day rituals against its panoramic backdrop: the park, Eastern Market, church steeples, Ford Field, and downtown. The dance incorporates the whole space and all those present, and the viewer can decide to move around the space, make choices and be experimental in their approach to the work.

Choreography and performance: Biba Bell

Music direction: Scott Zacharias

Video: Christine Hucal

Performance, host: Nicola Kuperus

Supported by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Additional research for It Never Really Happened was additionally supported by the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and by the Insel Hombroich Foundation in Neuss, Germany.

PC: Christine Hucal