Architecture & Dance: Intersections & Collaboration
An Interview with Frances Bronet
Blueprints Winter 2006-07
Volume XXV, No. 1
Frances Bronet is an educator and practicing architect who holds multiple degrees in architecture and engineering from McGill and Columbia universities. Currently dean of the School of Architecture & Allied Arts at the University of Oregon, she previously spent two decades on the faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Bronet has a longstanding interest in dance, and has written extensively about the myriad intellectual and physical relationships between dance and architecture. She has been involved directly in the creation of a number of performance pieces exploring these connections. Recent works include Beating a Path and Spillout!, both developed with choreographer Ellen Sinopoli, of the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company in Albany, New York.
Martin Moeller: How did you become interested in the relationships between dance and architecture?
Frances Bronet: It probably has multiple layers. First, I was a dancer myself. I was always interested in dance, even though it wasn’t part of my professional curriculum as an architect. Secondly, I was looking for a way to get my students to understand that spaces are occupied—they gain meaning from being inhabited.
Then I started wondering if there were concrete and much more immediate ways to think about space and movement. We know that great basketball players are always anticipating what space will be open next. They are working in a context of space in movement—space defined by how the players create openings. By contrast, in most of the spaces we occupy, things are completely predictable—the road goes a certain way; this space leads directly to that space. Must that always be the case?
Through Ken Warriner, I was introduced to a philosopher at RPI, John Schumacher, who wrote the book called Human Posture: The Nature of Inquiry. Together we explored the difference between what we called “ready-made space” and “space in the making,” borrowing from Bruno Latour’s concept of ready-made science versus science in the making. The idea was that when the context of the science shifts, will the configuration of the experiment and outcome change as well? Similarly, context (in this case, inhabitants) has an opportunity to actually transform space.
MM: Can you elaborate on the connection between Latour and architectural space?
FB: Bruno Latour’s Science in Action was a seminal textbook. One example in the book turns on a 1787 mission to sail far away from home and bring back a record of one's travels so that the next person will know what lies ahead. When the captain of this mission runs across a native person far from home the crucial difference between their lives is that the latter simply lives at a place that the captain must find a way somehow to “bring back.” The native people can help him find his way, say, by drawing something in the sand, but they could not care less when the waves wash it away. The captain, on the other hand, would no doubt have returned to his ship to draw it again.
Latour speaks of this as a process of "making" what will later become "ready-made." The captain's work begins a long process of various ships bringing things back home until they accumulate enough to act at a distance. The action at a distance is all the more tricky as it becomes ready-made: the making is forgotten, and the action at a distance is put in a black box. Right from the start of his book, Latour makes it clear that he is going in the back door of science, the door of science in the making, at a point when context and content are still unmistakably fused together.
This is what we wanted to explore—where context and content are one.
Now [in architecture] we generally make boundaries that are fixed. The pieces that I have developed with Ellen Sinopoli challenge the apparent inevitability of that. In Beating a Path, we were trying to make a space acted as a beaten path. For example, if you cross-country ski, you as one person will not make much difference in the landscape, but if a thousand people do it, then you have beaten a path.
MM: How did you conceive and build the physical armatures for Beating a Path?
FB: Both pieces evolved from the nature of the movement of dancers. In Beating a Path, we lined up a space (a storefront in downtown Troy), and had no idea what we were going to do, except I had decided that we would attempt designing without drawings and at full scale right from the start—how the Greeks laid out their temples. To begin, we found a piece of cardboard and a pipe lying in the street. The dancers rolled on cardboard over the pipe, then they moved up to plywood, and eventually that became a trapezoidal platform, made of glass, lit by hundreds of mini-Christmas lights to look like a uniform surface of light. So [the design] evolved out of experimentation.
One of our other ideas was to completely erase the boundaries between dance and architecture, so that the human bodies and the architectural bodies all moved. We had a rolling platform, so when the dancers would run one way, the floor would move the opposite way. The audience stood right around them, and I hoped that the audience would move as the dancers approached them. The irony is that, on the opening night, the audience closest to the performance area didn’t move, they were so intent on watching the human bodies, and the moving floors hit them! It was a lesson for me. We really have given up haptic experience in our daily lives—everything is prescribed, at least in the U.S., so that a fully mobile environment can easily throw us off. I wonder if this is the same in places like Beijing where an amazing dance-like chaos seems to reign in roads and other public spaces.
MM: And how was Spillout! conceived?
There was a similar motivation of the unfolding project—we started with a very simple structure. In one aspect of Beating a Path, we had developed a wall of full, stretch, spandex sheets that the dancers pulled, pushed, emerged out of, hid behind, and one of my colleagues said that whole performance could have been about that. Six months later I was in Naples [Italy], and saw a small installation using elastic bands, and I thought, “Could I use this to create a structure?” I called elastic companies and explained the idea, and none of them would guarantee that no one would get killed! In a University of Oregon design studio, students interpreted the linear elastic elements, and used bicycle inner tubes (and in Eugene these are very easy to come by—not so easy in Troy, New York!). For Spillout!, we began with ripping our former sheets from Beating a Path to see if lines of spandex would be a good vehicle for performance. Ultimately, we took 700 yards (54 inches wide) of spandex fabric, and then had a mattress company cut and stretch them. There were 1,000 spandex strips on the structure, and we had to hand-weave them into the frame.
MM: What role did light play in these pieces?
FB: In Spillout!, we anticipated how shadows would be cast on the existing buildings, and the silhouettes do create a completely other world. In fact, you can spend the entire hour of the performance watching the two-dimensional projections on the walls, which include the vibrating lines of the elastic and the hovering multi-scaled figures. Ellen Sinopoli wanted at one point to have the dancers fly out from the structure. By this time, the set was almost fully conceived and constructed, and we decided that the fly-out could happen only through shadows, so bodies are tightwalking the perimeter of the rooms through [FRANCES: I think something got left out here]. Until the last couple of weeks, we had not rehearsed the piece at night. When the lights went off, the dancers really had to know the relationship between the space and their bodies in order not to hurt themselves. And the wall itself appears solid when lit primarily from without; one wall fully dissolves when it is lit from within, and almost totally dissolves when lit from above.
MM: During these collaborative projects, did the architecture side and the dance side generally see eye to eye?
FB: One of collaborative dilemmas was that I loved the wall appearing impenetrable, as a sheet of blue lines, but that stopped us from seeing the total movement of the dancers. Dance trumped. In modern dance, many people collaborate, and deliberately keep their disciplines separate, and whatever emerges, emerges and the audience makes sense of it. In our pieces, I don’t think the choreographer and I had exactly the same views all the time. In my case, I was really trying to explore the idea of how there can be reciprocity between space and dance. I was not interested in symbols. But I think the dancers began to see themselves metaphorically, for example, one dancer started to see herself as a different animal for each piece.
Then there was the music. William Harper, the composer for Spillout!, knew that [the choreographer and I] were both working within a modern paradigm, and he decided to go postmodern. His work is really heavily derivative from contemporary culture; it is not what I would have conceived, but he decided he wanted to push against the minimalism of the piece. Ralph Pascucci, on video, saw the wall as a screen. David Yergan used his lighting to magnify the dancers. One of the most difficult parts of this collaboration for me was the distance. The project of space-in-the-making is one which may require day-to-day intervention and iteration; my being on the West Coast and communicating electronically with the team in Troy changed the nature of the process and hence the outcome.
MM: How have you incorporated these ideas into your teaching?
FB: When I started to do this with my students, it was a very intense way in a short period of time to get them to understand full-scale construction, the relation of body and space, other cultural and situational players, etc.
The question became, if the students designed something starting with a particular dance company, and then a different dance company came to use it, would [the new company] use it in the same way? For this project, the most successful project would be something that was not only stunning visually, but also experientially very powerful and flexible, not suggesting a singular or, even, predictable use.
One group’s project, for example, made a spectacular image, but three different companies came in and they used the set almost identically. In this case, the project was therefore a failure in that the students had created a “ready-made space” rather than a “space in the making.”
There was another project that was perhaps a little bit clumsier from a formal standpoint, but it challenged the way everyone used space. The dancers, in fact, vanished in the rooms created in the space, and they discovered that they had to use their voices in order to discover each other.
Of course, I’m not saying that this is the way to design everything. This was an experiment setting up challenges to traditional, hierarchical space. It was a first year design studio, so it was an early opportunity for students to design at full scale and work with people who actually would be experiencing the spaces they created. How do we provide options for occupation without giving up formal and spatial visual quality?
MM: How did your students react after participating in your dance-oriented design studios?
FB: I have heard from some students who said that these exercises helped them understand space. I have many students who worked with me in these design studios who came back to work with me on the commissioned dance projects. A number saw how disciplines colliding opened up possibilities. Having done the studios about once every five years, I still think it is a great way to open up architecture—to get students to think about the social and the physical simultaneously.
