By Biba Bell On Feb. 25, Detroit choreographer Biba Bell will launch a site-specific dance piece in a fifth floor corner apartment of a 1958 Mies van der Rohe high-rise in Lafayette Park. In the fashion of an intimate cocktail party, the 2-hour piece opens up a private space to a public audience. Here Bell, a Knight Arts Challenge winner, explores how she got the idea for mixing dance, domesticity, and modernism’s classic architecture.  

The initial spark for this project, It Never Really Happened, struck during a visit to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. I’d spent the afternoon getting lost amongst the extensive collection of 20th century artifacts. Rounding a far corner of the museum, I found myself facing head-on the strange beauty of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House. Designed to be a pre-fab home that, now, looks like a Jetsons’ modest paradise, this piece of architectural ingenuity (while never manufactured) could easily be thought a premonition satisfied best by today’s shipping crate homes.

Dymaxion House

Immediately I wanted to make a dance inside of it. Staged, it was already a set, but the scale and panorama windows and how they propelled a visual infatuation with the inside/outside or private/public threshold set my choreographic brain in motion. Walking through the archive of Ford(ism) that afternoon and encountering this little gem of a home really got me thinking and feeling something new. How did Detroit’s modernism relate to domesticity? And what was my own relationship to it?

A year or so later, I decided this piece would best live in an apartment in Lafayette Park, a Mies Van der Rohe village in downtown Detroit. So, I rented an apartment and began working. With floor to ceiling windows, inhabiting the corner unit is like being in a suspended glass box. The floor plan is relatively open and the living room literally is like philosopher Walter Benjamin says, “a box in the theater of the world.”

There is something about the apartment that simultaneously creates a sense of interiority and exposure. The panoramic view both expands the interior and accentuates the way the body is framed and even on display. It reminds me of being onstage as much as being in the sanctuary of the studio. I began reading about modernism and domesticity, the rise of  a “New Woman” during the 20th century who this home was built for, still the head of the reproductive economy of the time. But I also wanted to think about this through the lens of dance and my own personal history dancing and training, in addition to artistic questions about where I find my dancerly home.

window washer, Lafayette Pavilion, Detroit

In the past year and a half, I’ve had a couple of deeply informative research sessions. I began working with two dancers, Michelle Brock and Chris Woolfolk, in the apartment. We experimented with the space, developing material, witnessing the light changes, scale, and how the space lends itself improvisation.

dancer Michelle Brock in Detroit

I also had two residencies during this period where I developed the project elsewhere: at Insel Hombroich in Neuss, Germany, and at the Visual Arts Center (VAC) at the University of Texas in Austin. My time in Austin was especially exciting and brought a group of local collaborators together.

Xochi Solis, the curator who invited me, set up a series of “home residencies” in the city where I workshopped with groups of dancers and performers each day inside of a different domestic space. The homes each created completely different situations: a labyrinthian 1920s Craftsman style home of sculpture and costume design professors filled with wood, brown leather, and stone; a commune-like compound imagined by a former architecture student in the middle of a bamboo forest with Gaudi-esque buildings, trailers, found object sculptures, a giant workshop adorned with a vast wall of reclaimed windows; and an Italian-designed luxury home of museum patrons with vaulted ceilings, overhangs, huge windows at varying angles, and multi-level decks.

Each of theses spaces invited a completely different engagement. We danced with our eyes closed for hours, created imaginary walking tours, tried to map imperceptible transitions between stillness and extreme shaking, choreographed theatrical spectacles, and more. Eventually, we used all the material to create a 3 hour-long performance in the Center’s galleries.

Austin rehearsals of It Never Really Happened (Cont.)

Here in Detroit, I’m working with Christine Hucal on an accompanying video. We will be documenting the events and creating a video piece to follow. I’ve thought a lot about the cinematic qualities of the Van der Rohe while choreographing this first section of the piece as a way to accentuate the formalist relationship between the architecture and choreography. It Never Really Happened will have three different parts during three different seasons throughout the year and is divided into a solo, a duet and will culminate in a group performance.. I’m working with Scott Zacharias, a DJ and musician, on the sound that also pushes this cinematic quality.

At long last, the piece premieres next week! It has been an exciting journey and, once the public is invited in, the piece will have finally found its way home.

It Never Really Happened in Detroit

It Never Really Happened is free and open to the public, with an RSVP, and will take place at 5 p.m. Feb. 25 – 28 and March 7 and 8 at 1 Lafayette Plaisance #509, buzzer # 423. For information, call 917 589 1727. RSVP here.

Bell is also raising matching funds for her Knight Arts Challenge grant via Indiegogo.