CAMBRIDGE, MA.- The List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Choreographic Turn that will be on view through July 9, 2006. This exhibition features a 16mm film entitled Soft Materials by Daria Martin, an American artist living and working in London, and a large five-screen video installation entitled whenever on on on nohow on / airdrawing by German artist Peter Welz in collaboration with celebrated dancer/choreographer William Forsythe. In bringing together the work of these artists, curator Bill Arning offers audiences the opportunity to consider the space between dance and moving image in contemporary art practice. There is a growing history and cultural practice of choreocinema, or dance on film/video, a hybrid art form that offers previously unavailable experiences of dance. Choreographic Turn celebrates this exciting shift in cultural practice by showing two recent extraordinary iterations of this new form-film/video installations offering new modes of experiencing the art of bodies in motion.

Daria Martin documents a contact improvisational dance between two human dancers and state-of-the art, yet simple, robots in her 10 minute, 30 second film Soft Materials (2004). The newest generation of robots functions better because their intelligence centers-the "organs" that receive and respond to environmental stimuli-are located throughout their bodies rather than in one center analogous to the human brain. Talented human improvisatory dancers can be said to possess similar distributed bodily intelligence, and hence are the logical human collaborators for the new robots. Martin collaborated with the Artificial Intelligence lab at the University of Zurich, and traveled there to record her two human dancers' attempts to get the robots to respond to them. The sensual, visually exquisite film offers viewers an intimacy with both the dancers and robots which could not have been achieved without the mediation of the camera.

Whenever on on on nohow on (2004) was inspired by a consideration of the unique cadences found in Samuel Beckett's late writings, collected in his anthology Nohow On from 1981. Welz filmed Forsythe's extraordinary movements with five cameras, two of which were mounted on the dancer's arms, one facing inward and the other out, and three of which were aimed at Forsythe from the front, side, and above. Forsythe's precisely measured motions would be beautiful even without any technological mediation, but these five videos are projected on large screens that fill the gallery, so viewers physically enter within Forsythe's improvisatory body architectures and are fully encompassed by numerous views of, and from, the dancer. This allows an experience of the dancer's motion that no audience member at a performance could ever have, that of the actual owner/performer of the body in motion, Forsythe himself.

About The Artists - Daria Martin was born in San Francisco in 1973. She currently lives and works in London, England. Many of Martin's recent works conjure up the aura of the hyper-modern future envisioned by early 20th-century performers and artists such as Martha Graham, Virgil Thompson, Florine Stettheimer and Gertrude Stein. The fact that those visions of the future did not come to pass adds a bittersweet sense to Martin's restaging those historic images in her films. She received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2000 and in 2002 was artist in residence at Delfina Studios Trust in London. Martin has exhibited her work widely in Europe and the United States including solo shows at the Tate Britain in London, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Kunsthalle Zürich, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and Castlefield Gallery, Manchester. Her work is included in the 2006 Tate Triennial at the Tate Britain and is also part of a two person show, A World of Pleasures To Win, in Vienna, Austria. In 2006 she also exhibited Regeneration, a collaboration with Zeena Parkins, at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London. Daria Martin is represented by Maureen Paley in London.

Peter Welz was born in Lauingen, Germany, in 1972. He currently lives and works in Berlin. Welz began his career as a sculptor who used repeated human motions to generate his drawings and three-dimensional works. He collaborated with dancers who could execute the motions he needed for certain pieces. This led him to approach William Forsythe in 2004 to suggest a collaboration. Welz studied at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland, Cooper Union, New York, and Chelsea School of Art, London. In 2003 he received the Else-Heiliger-Grant of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation and was artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland. In 2005, he received the Kaiserring Award/Young artists grant in Goslar, Germany. Welz has exhibited widely in Europe and the United states, including solo shows at the The Renaissance Society in Chicago and to unsay at the Mönchehaus Museum für Moderne Kunst in Goslar, Germany.

William Forsythe was born in New York City in 1949. He currently lives and works in Frankfurt and New York City. Forsythe often has used technology to record and transmit his style of rigorously conceptual, ballet-based improvisations, even releasing a teaching CD-ROM, Improvisation Technologies, in 2000. Forsythe has a well-earned reputation for being open to the freedom and possibility inherent in collaboration and often works in visual arts contexts. From 1984 to 2004, Forsyth was Director of the Frankfurt Ballet and in 2004, he established the Forsythe Company, an independent dance company. Forsyth has received numerous awards for his achievements including the Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement in 2004, the Wexner Prize in 2002, Japan's Multimedia Grand Prix for Improvisation Technologies CD-Rom in 2000, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production and the Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, Paris in 1999. In 1996 Forsythe was awarded the 1st prize for Multimedia Installation Improvisation Technologies in the New Voices, New Visions competition at Lincoln Center, New York. He received his first Bessie Award for Choreography in 1988.

Choreographic Turn is made possible with generous support by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Council for the Arts at MIT, and Phoenix Media/Communications Group.