Jefferson Hack’s fashion-dance mashup: Dancers from Tanztheater Wuppertal perform in Prada
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Version 0 of 1. Ever since Coco Chanel was hired by Sergei Diaghilev to create the costumes for his 1924 production Le Train Bleu, stars of the fashion world have regularly worked as guest designers for dance. Halston, Karl Lagerfeld, Christian Lacroix, and Alexander McQueen are among those who have created costumes and, occasionally, sets for the dance stage, with both wonderful and sometimes disastrous results More recently, the relationship has started to work the other way, with fashion designers co-opting dance for their catwalk shows. Alexander McQueen invited Michael Clark to choreograph his spring–summer 2004 show, and in 2013, Rick Owens startled Paris by using street dancers instead of models. Related: Let’s Tanz: Pina Bausch’s dancers on her unearthed 80s creations But the two art forms are now being combined in a very different way, in a new project launched by Jefferson Hack, the Dazed group co-founder. MOVEment is a series of seven short films, commissioned in association with AnOther Magazine, on which Hack has invited designers and choreographers to collaborate on original ideas. As he explains: “We’ve created a neutral space where neither fashion or dance were leading the dialogue, where they could both be allowed to play.” The two have combined to think about costume and movement in ways that expand our ideas about bodies, clothes, and dance. An A-list of contributing names includes Miuccia Prada, and Sarah Burton from McQueen as well as choreographers Wayne McGregor and Russell Maliphant. When Hack began thinking about the project back in 2013, his idea was to commission some kind of in-depth investigation into the relationship between fashion and dance, using the medium of film rather than print. Having only an outsider’s knowledge of dance, he went for advice to Alistair Spalding, artistic director of Sadler’s Wells. “We had a lot of interesting conversations,” says Spalding, “going through a whole Rolodex of choreographers to work out which ones would suit which designers.” Some of the participants had strong opinions about who they wished to work with: Prada wanted to be paired with dancers from Tanztheater Wuppertal. Francisco Costa, from Calvin Klein, was keen to work with the American ballerina Julie Kent. But Hack says that though they tried to make each collaboration a pairing of “like minds”, there was no sense of cosiness about the resulting films, which he describes as “an incredible polyphony of voices”. He’s particularly proud of the Prada/Wuppertal collaboration. It’s a beautiful piece, set in a derelict theatre, in which the 10 dancers move through a sequence of delicate, exploratory duets. Both sexes are interchangeably dressed in male and female clothes, and the haunting strangeness of the film (directed by Kevin Frillet) is highlighted by the small white feathers that rain down on the dancers throughout. All seven films are radically different. In the Maliphant/Iris van Herpen collaboration, the dancer isn’t clothed in actual fabric, but in a “virtual” costume – a cloud of luminous digital particles. In the McGregor/Gareth Pugh collaboration, one of the costumes is made out of thousands of slender drinking straws that somehow move like fur. As Spalding says: “The relationship between fashion and dance has been blown out of the water. In some cases it has nothing to do with how a normal garment fits a human being.” Even where the dancer is more conventionally dressed, the film and choreography work their own transformations. Paris Opera ballerina Marie-Agnès Gillot wears a black lace dress from McQueen, yet as she dances it becomes the shroud of a dying swan, a goth ballgown, the robes of a flying angel. Hack says each film has brilliantly transcended its original brief, to become “a snapshot of an attitude, a philosophy, a mood”. After a public screening, the films will be released one at a time on anothermag.com. Hack has high ambitions for the audience they will find: “Once they’re out on the web, they will travel really far.” But he’s equally keen for MOVEment to become the first step of a much bigger project: “I hope we can go on to explore different commissions, maybe even for the stage. I really think this is just the beginning of the dialogue.” • The MOVEment films will be screened at Sadler’s Wells’ Lilian Baylis Studio on 18 April, presented by AnOther Magazine in association with Ford Vignale. Box office: 0844 412 4300. |