Exterior dance

Urban Art is public art. Whether you are counting in sculptures in a park or a dance company’s act on a market place – art is examining our societal environment as well as our relationship with art and the real.

Of course, we dream – and how much the very word “dance” stirs the imagination – of a new Rimbaud who “stretches ropes from steeple to steeple,” or the unpredicted outbreak of drunken maenads in the conforming and ordinary city.

Dancing the city and dancing life; what a utopia! Sometimes, however, a show can shake the landscape around it and create a temporal parenthesis, suspended in the urban tumult. Sometimes the path of a few dancers may also disturb our functional routine, and make us suddenly attentive of the matter of which ground and wall are made, in accordance with our physical bodies in the surrounding space, and to the emptiness of its hindrances. In short, it gives us a taste of freedom. Perhaps this is a function of art regardless of the place.

Choreographer Daniel Dobbels expresses this more gravely, more politically when he writes, “A dancer cannot dance without having within himself the hope that all bodies might also be free to move.”

By venturing out to ...