Maria Hassabi - SoloShow

2009 / 60’

»...SoloShow was a startling sixty-minute performance. From start to finish, Hassabi absorbed a set of given cultural images –all of women – and deposed them within figurative lines of flight. The result was a granular interpolation of movement as each image described a passage within the matrix of a whole. Each posture was held for an impossible period of time, then transfigured or almost shattered by the frankly muscular strain. This enactment took place against a black painted monolith -part sculpture, part stage, and part abstract pictorial ground. You recognized a fragment from Scavullo’s seventies Vogue, from Maillot’s River or Rodin’s Iris, and bits of Diaghilev’s Russian ballet. Sometimes the transitions felt lyrical and satiny. At other times the distortions were almost brutal -Mendieta?, Bacon? Polansky? In the end, though, Hassabi attained the larger image of a mobility that, whilst always radiant, remained fastened to both its time frame and itself. This mobility was not projected by cultural forces from outside. Its plasticity was transcribed by muscles and bone as well as the mind. So, if this larger image intensified bodily force before the visible, it might also show why Nietzsche considered dance a crucial art. The dancer is not a screen but the bodily cause of image projection. It is almost as if human beings could be affected by sensuous thought.« (Scott Lyall)

Organisation: City of Women; In collaboration with: Dance Theatre Ljubljana, Emanat Institute.

Supported by: A Space for Live Art, The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts.