Flocks

Dec 13

The dance company is a social sphere in which the dancers live, love and work. In ‘Flocks,’ I collaborated with renowned contemporary dance companies around the world, asking dancers to collapse together en masse. This body of work is my search for what remains in the dancers’ bodies when the dance stops. When movement is drained from the body and the performative purpose is removed, only the possibility of movement that lies beneath the surface remains.

The companies I've worked with, distinct from each other in culture, heritage, and sensibility, each responded to the challenge differently. Through the network of relationships between the dancers in each individual group, the company’s own idiosyncratic physical language came to the surface. And yet, the resulting photographs all have a shared quality, revealing something fundamental about how dancers physically communicate.

Relying mostly on nonverbal language, the dancers formed intricate living sculptures. As they worked together, the minute dialogues between them enabled the creation of a larger visual narrative. The intertwining of bodies carries an undercurrent of sex and death, reflecting and amplifying the complexity of human relationships.

Nir Arieli

You can read our interview with Nir here.