The Body in Movement Dance and the Museum

For its second season, the Petite Galerie at the Louvre, dedicated to art and culture education, is offering an initiation into representation of "The Body in Movement." The guest at the Musée du Louvre is one of the performing arts: dance. Observing works from the Louvre and its partners will help visitors appreciate the challenge conveying movement represents for artists, and the solutions they have come up with, using the different materials and techniques available to them. Walking, running, stopping in your tracks-not to mention such "movements of the soul" as terror: what conventions govern representation of the movements and postures involved? Artworks are by nature static, but artists were trying to anatomize movement long before chronophotography came along and opened up new perspectives for them in the late 19th century. In their efforts to capture movement avant-garde artists like Degas and Rodin turned to the world of dance. Around 1900, drawing on antiquity and the work of dancers like Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Nijinsky, the discipline underwent its own revolution: an innovative gestural repertoire and a break with classical ballet that foreshadowed modern dance. Thus choreography and the visual arts intermeshed. Organized by: Benjamin Millepied, choreographer, and Jean-Luc Martinez, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre.
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