Falls the Shadow is a site-specific, 30-minute performance art piece made in and for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum rotunda.
American Ballet Theatre principal Daniil Simkim’s contribution to Works & Process–the performing arts series at the Guggenheim–is a hybridization of movement, fashion, sound, and technology. The performance is the product of many efforts: a new choreography by Alejandro Cerrudo, interactive media design by Aristides Job Garcia Hernandez, costume design by the Artistic Director of Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri, and unique performances by dancers Cassandra Trenary, Ana Lopez, and Brett Conway, along with Simkim himself.
Designed to be viewed from above the spiraling ramps for the full visual effects of light and shadow, guests crowded against the ramps to witness the multimedia performance on two special nights of September 4th & 5th. Digital images flowed from the floor of the museum up to the ramps, reaching all the way to the dome, pulling the audience into the digitization. The experience was a harmony of juxtapositions; it was poetry brought to life by flesh, by physical bodies dancing and moving in front of our eyes. An excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” was handed out:
[…]
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Between the conception
And the Creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
[…]
The performance grappled with various binaries: of time and gravity, humanization and digitization, destruction and creation, structure and flow, gender: the presence and the lack of, calculation and impulse, violence and benevolence. It required the participation of the audience: for us to actively decipher, analyze, and attempt to comprehend the strange, otherworldly combination of sound, movement, and digital imagery.
