CHICAGO, IL.- The Museum of Contemporary Art , Chicago, presents Daria Martin’s film Minotaur that pays tribute to the work of legendary dancer Anna Halprin, one of the key pioneers of postmodern dance and movement. The film depicts a sensuous duet choreographed by Halprin based on the Auguste Rodin 1886 sculpture Minotaur. The exhibit is on view October 3, 2009 to February 7, 2010.
Rodin’s erotic sculpture portrays the part-man, part-bull figure from Greek mythology with a naked young female figure in its grasp. Martin carefully edited the film to juxtapose the movements of the two dancers with close-up views of the sculpture; images of the sculpture in a book; views of the wooded exterior of Halprin's Northern California studio where the dance takes place; and shots of Halprin herself. In doing so, Martin creates a complex and multilayered synthesis of various art forms -- film, dance, and sculpture -- while simultaneously meditating on the process through which art is made, and the shifting sexual dynamics between men and women as embodied in both the sculpture and Halprin’s performative interpretation of it.
Halprin’s life and work significantly influences Martin’s use of implicit sensuality and a heightened awareness of the body and its relationship to other objects and the surrounding space. Minotaur interweaves highly conceptualized and choreographed physical movement; layered stagecraft; and editing and cinematographic techniques evoking a broad range of both mainstream and experimental filmmaking.
Daria Martin was born in 1973 in San Francisco and lives and works in London. This installation is the third in a series of projects jointly developed by and presented as part of the Three M Project, a consortium of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, with the purpose of stimulating the creation of new work by artists not yet well-known in the United States. The MCA presentation is coordinated by Dominic Molon, MCA Curator.
