Hopkins Center for the Arts

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NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE

Slow Dancing

by David Michalek

Sunday, June 22 – Saturday, June 28
8:30 pm – Midnight
Hopkins Center Outdoor Plaza • Free

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Last summer, the front of Lincoln Center was transformed by three giant video screens, each with an illumined image in ultra-slow-motion of renowned dancers like Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Bill Shannon, Judith Jamison—and viewers on the plaza below were transfixed. This monumental, hypnotic video installation by photographer David Michalek breaks through both technological and aesthetic barriers, soaring beyond definitions of dance and portraiture. Using a specialized video camera shooting 1000 frames a second, Michalek filmed 43 individual dancers, slowing 5-second movement phrases to 10-minute gestures at glacial-speed: hair flows as if under water, fingers unfold in self-discovery, fluid fabric swirls—all in silence. A profoundly personal sensory experience, it is also an epic public encounter with a global array of dancers and styles—ballet, modern, traditional. Slowed in time, exposed in intimate detail and magnified to a godly scale, these dancers draw us into Michalek's vision: “to look longer and harder and deeper at my fellow human beings…and the sacred potential of art.”