2020
Photographic Installation by Emanuel Gat
‘2020’ is a sort of retrospective exhibition, tracing the photographic work of Emanuel Gat.
Divided into three distinct, yet overlapping chapters, it offers a comprehensive look into the choreographers’ photographic perception of his own choreographic research and practice.
In the intimacy of the studio, immersed in the working space of his dancers and collaborators, Gat uses the camera in order to pierce through the visible layers of action (or lack thereof), in the pursuit of an autonomous visual imprint of both the specific choreographic pieces being created, as well as the tangible human presence of his dancers.
Each chapter approches the question of photographic interpretation in a different manner, guiding the eye and experience of the viewer through different entry points, into the 'behind the scenes' of the choreographic process.
By giving a visual form to the emotions, Emanuel Gat's photographic installations claim the priority of the individual experience. Photos of the two series, LOVETRAIN and GOLD, and the single photo of BC, were taken by the choreographer during rehearsals of Brilliant Corners (2011), The Goldlanbergs (2013), and LOVETRAIN2020, in 2020. All are taken in the same place, the Cunningham studio at the Agora - Cité internationale de la danse in Montpellier, with the only light source being the natural light coming through the large windows, capturing a group of people in a darkened space engaged in a choreographic moment.
The photos are orchestrated into a "performance" timeline and presented within a carefully staged environment, sometimes accompanied a soundtrack: excerpts from "The quiet in the land", a radio documentary created by Glenn Gould for GOLD, a sound recording of a performance of Brilliant Corners for BC.
Not documentary nor staged, these images emanate an ambiguous sense of one reality taking place within another. Photography not as a tangible proof of the real or as authority that transcends the interpretative, but rather portraits of people which are real just as they are disturbingly beyond the commonplace.
LOVETRAIN
This new photographic series, taken during the first stages of rehearsals on LOVETRAIN2020, is an attempt to capture the specific vibe and atmosphere emanating from this very special phase of the creative process. The vibrant energy of ‘beginnings’, mixed with the hesitations, wonderings, questioning and carful yet attentive exploration into new and uncharted territories. These moments contain both a calm clarity of intention, as well as a the presence of a wide and blurry unknown space laying ahead, waiting to be discovered and bring into focus.
The images capture a person or group engaged in a moment of choreographic research, a moment of suspenseful drama, and create a mood of lingering uncertainties, doubts and opportunities.
BC
Contrary to the other two photographic series, GOLD and LOVETRAIN, taken during the rehearsals of the respective pieces, the one photo titled BC was taken during a performance of Brilliant Corners, (2011). This photographic moment, mounted on a light box and presented in a dark space filled with the sounds recorded during one of the performances of the work, is an invitation for a long and focused gaze. A contemplation into one specific moment of the live performance, echoing the continuity of time through the accompanying soundtrack. Vertical and horizontal, mid-air between standing and falling, on the meeting point of light and dark, this photo is an attempt to capture the dynamic dancing body in all of its drama and existential potency.
A reduction of an entire choreographic piece, into one concentrated photographic moment.
GOLD
Paintings in all but technique, in the vein of chiaroscuro art, these photographs embrace the immediacy of the body, light, shadow, and texture as subject matter. Gothic in their intense mystery and baroque in their indulgent tangible lust, they are reminders of just how extraordinary and poetic the ordinary can be. How familiar people, in the changing light of the artistic act can become charged and powerfully intimate to us. Between sensuality and degradation, darkness and ominous light, fragility and vulnerability, these moments of suspenseful drama create a mood of lingering uncertainty through the repeated 'gazing away from the viewer' they all share. A beauty not of perfection, but one born out of vulnerabilities, uncertainties, doubts and opportunities.
The contradictions of intimacy and unfamiliarity generate a sense of the fleeting, of a story never fully told, of the transient rather than captured moments of reality or conjured images of staged fantasy. They contain grandeur and opulence, but also evoke moods of silence, introspection and a certain subversiveness.
