Images © Daniel Senzek
Parallel Bodies
Finissage of the exhibition 'Gormley / Lehmbruck: Calling on the Body'
Premiere - 26th February 2023 - Lehmbruck Museum
Choreography, Concept & Costumes
Virginia Segarra Vidal
Dancers
Camilla Agraso, Svetlana Bednenko, Philip Handschin, Edvin Somai
About Parallel Bodies
Architecture and sculpture have always been a source of great fascination for me, especially antiquity and its constructions: temples, civil buildings, theatres, and homes—spaces created for different purposes, designed and constructed by humans as a way of expressing their culture and as a medium for accommodating their needs. These places were created for socializing, worshipping, governing, and living. Statues, friezes, and caryatids are an inspiration to me, as they seem to tell stories of times gone by.
'Parallel Bodies' is an exploration of the relationship between architecture, its proportions, edges, and the connection it can have with the body. The choreography is a study of the natural choreography of a specific building and its narrative perspectives. Created for the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg to mark the end of the exhibition 'Gormley / Lehmbruck: Calling on the Body,' it offered the opportunity to remove the dancers from the stage and place them instead in a different environment: a museum. The sculptures of Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Antony Gormley served as the starting point for the choreographic process. Their state of being and quiet contemplation inspired me to create a dialogue with the architectural space, combining my movement language with the dimensions of the museum. The dancers tested the volume of the space and became a part of the structure of the building, using the architecture as a vehicle to reflect on our experience of space and time. 'Parallel Bodies' is a metaphor for the potential movement of a sculpture placed on a plinth—still and silent but evocative of all that the viewer can imagine and feel.