What's on and booking
PETER WILLIAMS'
DESIGN FOR DANCE 2012
22 designers + 83 dancers + 22 choreographers = 22 performances.
The long-running collaboration between CSM, Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance, Central School of Ballet and the London Studio Centre comes to the PLATFORM THEATRE.
Pushing the barriers of design and dance, the PLATFORM is proud to host the future pioneers of the art form. We're excited for audiences to see what this collision of talent and ideas has produced.
Each programme will feature up to eleven original dance pieces.
PROGRAMME 1
- Thursday 23 February, 7.30pm
- Friday 2 March, 7.30pm
PROGRAMME 2
- Friday 24 February, 7.30pm
- Thursday 1 March, 7.30pm
Tickets: £10. £5 concessions.
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CAROLINE EVANS
The Modernist Body: Mechanization, Motion and the Missing Part
Caroline Evans will talk about her research on modernism and the first fashion shows in France and America from 1900-1929. Walter Benjamin described the advent of ‘new velocities’ that gave modern life an altered rhythm, and from 1900 the desire to see women’s fashion in motion flourished on both sides of the Atlantic as models tangoed, slithered, swaggered and undulated across couture house and department store stages. Evans connects the first fashion shows to Taylorism, the chorus line and Fordist aesthetics, arguing that their modernism was that of the rationalization of the body in the fields of work, leisure and mass culture, rather than of the avant garde. Yet the modernist body was also gendered and motile. Animated film strips of modernist sensibilities, early twentieth-century fashion models developed a unique language of the body. Their paradoxical modernity lay in their capacity to constitute themselves as objects through the eloquence of their mute performance. In a period when the social and economic emancipation of women were urgent and pressing questions, however, what kind of agency can be attributed to women whose performance was so fleeting, so ambiguous, and so minimal?
Caroline Evans’s forthcoming book The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America is due from Yale University Press in autumn 2012.
Thursday 6th March 6:30pm