Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and NYU Skirball present the North American premiere of Room with a View, a collaboration between the electronic music producer Rone, the dance collective (LA)HORDE and the Ballet National de Marseille.
Room with a View (2020), a large-scale, multidisciplinary performance featuring 20 dancers, shares a name with Rone’s fifth studio album and was created during a ten-day carte blanche residency at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet. A rave takes place in an otherworldly set that evokes both a rock quarry and white box space. Industrial machinery cuts and polishes the rock, while Rone uses electronic machinery to sculpt sweeping, emotional soundscapes for a group of partygoers. In this liminal space, sounds, bodies and images are open to interpretation, inscribable with a variety of meanings that reflect the ever-shifting nature of human existence.
While sculptors traditionally work with marble to, in the words of Michelangelo, “free the human form inside the block,” the performers dance to escape from the rigidity of the stone. With movement drawn from both raves and protests, the dancers explore humanity’s role in an impending disaster. Their chaotic, revelatory dancing underscores the persistence of beauty in even the most catastrophic of times.
Founded by Roland Petit in 1972 and granted Centre Chorégraphique National status in 1984, the Ballet National de Marseille is made up of 22 dancers hailing from 16 different countries. The dance collective (LA)HORDE has been at the head of the BNM since 2019. Through films and live performances, as well as choreographic creations, (LA)HORDE explores the political impact of dance and maps out the choreographic contours of popular uprisings, whether mass movements or isolated campaigns, spanning the dance spectrum from raves to folkloric dances, not to mention jumpstyle.
Room with a View is part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival in New York.
