Architects Draw: Ten Tiny Dances
Ten Tiny Dances/South Waterfront- A Large-scale Summer Performance Walkabout Event; Commissioned by the South Waterfront Artist in Residence Program; Curated by South Waterfront Artist in Residence Program Curator and Director - Linda K. Johnson and Ten Tiny Dances founder - Mike Barber; Duration 2 hours; Portland, Oregon; 20,000 SF; 2008.
"The principal value to him [the architect] in freehand drawing lies in the act of disciplining the whole organism — his own, that is — in order to understand with every fiber in his body the true nature of space." Dore Ashton "The Free Hand"
This event invited performance-based artists to create site-specific works within the high-rise towers of the new South Waterfront development. The only constraint was a 4'x4' stage- the signature component of the Ten Tiny Dances performance series. Choosing a freshly scraped site along the industrial edge of the new neighborhood, we began by asking ourselves how could we, as architects, see the site as more than a blank slate?
In walking through this landscape we found a shared desire to somehow use our bodies as drawing tools, making large-scale, real-time "life" drawings that directly respond to the features of the landscape. We set to work re-imagining the given 4x4 stage as series of "surveying suits" that extruded pink survey string to layout full scale drawings of surrounding, soon-to-be-erased, features- cranes, barges, bridges, power lines and clouds.
"Even the object most familiar to our eyes becomes totally different if one applies oneself to drawing it: one perceives that one didn’t really know it, one had never really seen it." Paul Valery, "Degas, Dance and Drawing"
- photos of performance by Christine Toth, www.christinetoth-artstudio.com