Dimitri Chamblas: Slow Show

Conceived and choreographed by Dimitri Chamblas, Slow Show is an intensive, collective dance performance whose visible repercussions are minimal, precise, and concentrated. Presented for the first time in 2018 with dance students from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) at Hauser and Wirth Los Angeles and at the MAK Center at the Schindler House, the performance is rooted in the principles of trance, exultation, telepathy, and unconscious memories, revealing its strength and vivacity through movements slowed to the extreme, almost imperceptible, almost invisible. The invisible is not emptiness, nor is it calmness or absence. The subtlety of the movements doesn’t take away the intensity nor the exhaustion growing from a stretched time instead of a possible frenetic trance.

Slow Show has been performed in different locations around the world; each repetition is unique, gathering around 50 local people from all ages and backgrounds and answering to their immediate context. The 20-minute performance is accompanied by sound and music composed by musician, artist, and DJ Eddie Ruscha.

Slow Show Installation brings together a selection of 18 filmed portraits depicting participants over the course of worldwide performances that took place in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Arles (France), Minneapolis (USA) and Charleroi (Belgium). Chamblas, in collaboration with Manuela Dalle, captured these moving images that are now shown for the first time in a specially devised environment at Luma Westbau. Submerged in a blue, low light – which has a calming effect on the brain – and surrounded by projections of floating bodies that move to a site-specific soundscape, the reclining structure in the space invites the audience to lay down, slow down and immerse themselves in a shared experience.