"Dance/Draw," the Institute of Contemporary Art's celebratory centerpiece in honor of its 75th anniversary, is an overt celebration of humanity's obsession and fascination with movement. While most art represents a single moment in time, the pieces featured in "Dance/Draw" focus more on a work's untold story — the process involved in finding and capturing that single moment.
For example, a series of 25 photographs documents the movements of a breakdancer from the beginning of a specific move to its completion. The set highlights all the steps needed to perform the move correctly, details that most onlookers might miss if they watched the dancer in person.
But photographs aren't the only attraction in "Dance/Draw" — it is most certainly a multimedia exhibit. Alongside photographs are various drawings, sculptures, hanging pieces, videos and even live components.
In "Floor of the Forest," two dancers from the Trisha Brown Dance Company slowly and carefully intricate and extricate themselves from secondhand pieces of clothing suspended in a matrix of rope. As soon as the dancers enter the gallery, a hush falls over the gathered spectators, who have no clue what to expect from such a curious setup. However, curiosity soon turns to fascination as the dancers hang suspended from various pieces of clothing, only to move slowly across the web and descend into a new outfit minutes later.
One of the most simple but intriguing pieces is a black and white video of a hand. All this hand does for five minutes is move: flex, point, curl its fingers, flip from palm-up to palm-down, rotate and contract. Yet the simplicity of the video is mesmerizing, and viewers will find themselves tempted to mirror the hand's movements with their own hands.
"Dance/Draw" focuses tightly on pieces like this, which depict artistic basics like movement and form. The exhibit also smoothly branches out to include pieces that are initially questionable or odd.
One of the most peculiar installations — and one of the best examples of the idea that art can be made with more than just the hands — is a video of artist Janine Antoni creating a painting with a rather unusual tool: her hair. The video shows Antoni dunking her entire head into a vat of black hair dye, then proceeding to paint the surrounding floor with the dye using only the rotations of her neck and head. True, the resulting painting is not necessarily what most people consider art, but it is the process, not the product, that makes this piece worth noting.
Another piece by Antoni featured in "Dance/Draw" seems more conventional at first look but holds a surprise for those who care to read the information card. "Butterfly Kisses" appears to be drawn with pen, but Antoni actually used CoverGirl Thick Lash Mascara to create the small, intricate markings that appear on the paper.
In the same vein, there is a "drawing" made by bouncing a basketball covered in dirt on a piece of paper.
One of the goals of "Dance/Draw" is to highlight the evolution of drawing from the '60s to today, and the eclectic mix of more traditional drawings with videos and live pieces accomplishes this goal in a more than satisfactory fashion.
"Dance/Draw" is by no means a passive exhibit. As soon as you enter the show, you become a participant in the featured art, rather than a bystander. Gallery-goers can literally walk through some of the pieces featured in this exhibit and spend hours watching all the videos shown in "Dance/Draw's" many rooms.
"Dance/Draw" runs from Oct. 7 to Jan. 16, 2012, and I would advise anyone who has ever looked at a painting and wondered, "How did the artist create this?" to stop by to have that question answered.
