One hundred artists/performances inspired Cristian Duarte on his new creation The Hot One Hundred Choreographers - a dance collection that brings together choreographic references of one hundred choreographers/performances that informed his artistic trajectory in dance.
How to bodily discuss a collection of references along a journey of training, watching, creating and performing in the dance scene? The dancer and choreographer Cristian Duarte seeks to problematize the issue with this work.
The starting point - and inspiration - for the creation was the work of Scottish artist Peter Davies, who created a multicolored text-painting of one hundred artists/works of his preference, entitled "The hot one hundred". Cristian Duarte carried this procedure of Davies to his choreography environment and “devoured” various dance icons, choreographers and pieces that instigated him.
The Hot One Hundred Choreographers is filled with references ranging from classical to pop, revealed on stage not in a narrative or illustrative way, but in a “choreographic game” of his personal references collected along his dance education and practice.
"This piece is not a representation of choreographic excerpts of other artists, it is a crop of tendencies that accompany me. My attempt is to reveal the nuances of passing from one reference to another, how the moving body negotiates with its own repertoire and memory. It is also an open invitation for the audience to accompany me, activating their own collections, knowledge and perceptions about dance history in this referencing tribute. I am more interested in the gaps and distortions of it, in the impossibilities and transformations of this game”, says Duarte.
Cristian watched in person a great part of the pieces listed, others through internet research. Therefore, adopted the criteria to list only the choreographers who have their work available online (youtube, vimeo, website or similar). "Hard work, because in some cases, we found only the choreographer, but not the work we wanted for the 'hot-list'. When this happened, we had the following choices: choose another piece, remove it from the list or find the piece in another platform. We chose the last option", says Cristian.
To conceive the "hot list" with the names of one hundred choreographers and pieces, Cristian Duarte, in collaboration with Rodrigo Andreolli, used as reference the book "The Infinity of Lists" by Umberto Eco, in which he reflects on how the idea of catalogs, lists, enumerations, and inventories has changed over the centuries and how this change was expressed through literature and the visual arts, giving other organizational and perceptual arrangements to the lists. Then, the “hot radial list” emerged, without enumeration, casting its content by colors and without fixed place. Everytime the webpage is reloaded/refreshed the colors are automatically rearranged.
Following this concept, the soundtrack was composed by Tom Monteiro, creating a mashup of several sound clips and music extracted from the contents of the list. In the same direction, the light design by André Boll, creates an unstable colored field, where lights oscillate from one shade to another, never reaching one full tonality, just as Cristian aims on stage: to promot provisory agreements between different choreographic references and presenting it as a biographic book of his body.
to check the list: hot100.cristianduarte.net